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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2770 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This has resurfaced and been trending for a while

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Currently at 42.1% red and 57.9% blue.

What would you choose? (See also r/slatestarcodex discussion)

I was motivated to post because I have a convincing argument for blue:

  1. Stupid people will choose blue. You may not care about the disabled, elderly, generally moronic, etc. but this includes children and people who are "too generous": nice, but emotional, and devote their lives to charity

  2. Thanos snapping a decent amount of the population (including random children, and biased towards selflessness) will probably overall negatively affect society

  3. I probably won't die because most people choose blue, as evidenced by the poll. Even if I do, it may be preferable to living with the survivors (point #2)

Something something time preference.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where red won. Sociologically it would be an interesting question of how a society which thanos snapped itself would cope. Rugged individualism? "They were stupid and weak for picking blue, we're the smart ones."?

I think that kind of attitude is shortsighted.

Consider that you're currently living in a world where red all but won (we are ruled by massive nation-states and corporations that live according to the principle of preserving themselves first and promote people who do that for them), and the percentage of those really willing to take major risks for others is quite low when put to a real test. Conversely, there must be many decent people who would vote red yet aren't complete insufferable psychopaths and egoists (if only because ~45% of voters on a major twitter poll probably aren't completely insufferable).

If you hold people to the standard of them being willing to risk their own life to save yours, you'll likely find yourself disappointed. (Not just risk, in fact - risk implies some measure of the risker's skill and agency mattering - but gamble.)

I think people are acting more selfless than they really would be, and ofc voting was influenced by surrounding discourse, and of course the scenario is that red won, so some <50% of the population picked blue and died. The plurality of less-selfish people who voted blue, who then get thanos-snapped, were probably load bearing to some degree. I think there are a lot of negative externalities to red winning that red-pressers aren't considering.

Would you still answer the same way if the poll showed 42.1% blue and 57.9% red? Like, are you actually willing to commit suicide to not live in such a world?

Because I'm not. If that's the way the world goes then that's the way the world goes, I'll still choose to be here until I die.

Also 40% isn't too far off from the Black Death's estimated toll of 30% to 60% of Europe's population. Is modern society too much of a fucking pussy to survive what Europe survived a few centuries ago? I doubt it. We're going to bounce back fine in the long-run. The intervening years will suck, but that's no excuse to give up on civilization rebuilding. (And maybe they won't even suck! The cost of labor went way up after the Black Death, so surviving craftsmen did pretty well.)

STOP DOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

  • FAKE THINGS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DISCUSSED SERIOUSLY
  • MILLENIA OF HYPOTHETICALS yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for discussing made up scenarios
  • Wanted to talk about something that hasn’t happened for a laugh? We had a tool for that. It was called GUESSING.
  • “Yes please give me A WORLDWIDE VOTE USING A SET OF BUTTONS THAT HAVE THE POWER TO INSTANTLY KILL PEOPLE BASED ON WHAT BUTTON OTHER PEOPLE PRESSED.” “Please give me A TRAIN TRACK THAT FORKS IN TWO, SOMEHOW IS UNABLE TO STOP, FOR SOME REASON FIVE PEOPLE ARE TIED TO THE TRACKS AND ONE PERSON TO ANOTHER ONE, AND FOR SOME REASON YOU HAVE A LEVER TO CHANGE THE TRACK THE TRAIN IS ON BUT CANT JUST UNTIE THE PEOPLE” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

LOOK at what Philosophers have been demanding your respect for all this time, with all the books and charts we built for them.

This is REAL philosophy done by REAL philosophers (and internet wannabe philosophers)

Chinese_room.jpg

Violinist.jpg

Veil_of_ignorance.jpg

“Hello I would like to talk about what I think I would do in an entirely impossible imaginary scenario”

They have played us for absolute fools

context

A true utilitarian/consequentialist should vote with whatever you expect the majority to be.

The only time your red vote matter is if there is a red majority. The only time a blue vote matters is if there everyone else in the world perfectly ties and your vote is the tiebreaker to blue. This is absurdly ridiculously unlikely, however in the event it happens it's absurdly ridiculously impactful. If you assume everyone else in the world is going to vote blue with probability p, and actually run the math, then you save the maximum number of lives by voting with whichever side of 50% that p is on. If the world population even slightly favors red then there is ~0% chance Blue will win and your vote has astronomically tiny chances of winning (billions of lives saved divided by quadrillions to one odds of it mattering). In this scenario, you aren't sacrificing your life to save anyone else, the children will die no matter what you do. In the original scenario, there is no communication or time to communicate, everyone is presented with the scenario and votes. If the world leans red, you either die for no reason or you live and try to pick up the pieces left over after however many people die, die. You cannot save them.

On the other hand, if the world leans blue, then you should vote blue. There is a tiny chance your vote matters, but also a tiny chance that through randomness you die voting blue, and it ends up being just barely worth it for non-selfish people.

If you have absolutely no idea how the world leans and p could be anything then you've got about a 50-50. There's a 1/2 chance voting blue kills you, and a 1/(world population) chance you are the tiebreaker and save half the world's population, meaning an average of 1/2 life saved. In this case, I think blue is probably better because of the second order effects of losing half the world's population and the ramifications that would have on society.

However, importantly, we DO have some idea on how the world leans. A significant fraction of people are mean and selfish. A significant fraction of people aren't willing to sacrifice themselves to save random strangers. Half of people have an IQ below 100 and are just going to press the red button because that's the simple, safe answer for themselves. If educated, western, liberal, rational people are arguing about this and half of them are red and half are blue, what do you think all of the poor people in third world countries are going to vote? What do you think people in foreign nations with foreign religions and cultures are going to vote? What do you think they're going to think we are going to vote? What do you think they think their next door neighbors who they have been warring with for thousands of years are going to vote? Are Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Algeria/Morocco, Iran/USA going to vote blue, suspecting that their hated enemy is probably going to vote red? Or are they going to fear that billions of people living somewhere else that they don't know are going to vote red, and use that to justify what they secretly wanted in their hearts which was to vote red. Voting blue requires sacrifice, willpower, courage, and also to think that everyone else shares those virtues with you. I think there are a lot of people like that, but not half. Blue is an unstable Schelling point, because any doubt or uncertainty makes people think that other people think that.... Red is stable. And therefore red is correct in the world we actually live in. For empirical reasons.

I'm still on Team Blue. This is a coordination problem. You need to get close to 100% of people to pick Red in order for Red to be non-horrifying. Blue only needs 51%. As long as some significant portion of the population are picking Blue, and I don't think it's possible to change that, Blue is the only option that prevents atrocity.

The good endings here, so to speak, are 100% Red, or 50+% Blue. The latter is achievable, and the former is not.

Is this stupid? Yes. If everybody were rational, we could all just pick Red and we'd be fine. But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

Consider that bullet bitten.

I am sick and tired of being dragged down by the irrational, the foolish and the unlucky. Myself included.

Red, and be done with it. Come what may. Everything else is retarded mind games.

I'd argue that in terms of pure self-interest, you should vote Blue, because even supposing that the majority of Blue voters are irrational idiots, the deaths of the dumbest 40% or so of society will drag you down. You should expect significant suffering as a result.

If the dumbest 40% of society are going to die, so am I if I vote with them. Am I missing something here?

Pretending to be retarded so I can be a part of a mass suicide doesn't seem like a great strategy; if it turns out to be actually so terrible (which I strongly doubt), I've certainly got personal options for dealing with a life-not-worth-living due to inadequate idiots in the world.

The empirical evidence seems to be that Blue wins anyway, but put it this way. If the vote is anywhere near close, then I think it is vitally important to get swing voters to pick Blue. A narrow win for Blue is fine; a narrow loss for Blue is the worst thing that has ever happened in human history, perhaps rivalled only by mass mortalities like the Black Death.

If the vote is not going to be close, then sure, pick Red. If it's a decisive win for Blue then whatever, we're all fine. If Blue cannot crest 30% or 35% or so, then you voting Blue would accomplish nothing but your own death.

However, judging from the Twitter poll, we seem to be in a world where Blue is winning with roughly 55-60% or so, and in that world... just keep Blue on top. Everything is fine as-is, and there is no reason to try to drag the Blue percentage down below that crucial 50% threshold.

Twitter is not the world though -- maybe Twitter should actually run the experiment, with the consequence to being a losing Blue a permaban!

But seriously, Twitter has like half a billion MAU -- even if we accept the poll-takers as representative of Twitter, there are another several billion humans out there for many of whom "if you press this button you might die, if you press this one you won't" is a compelling case.

Again: Retarded mind games.

I'll take those deaths. And the suffering. I'll take those rather than be badgered into a stupid decision by the stupidity of others. I've had quite enough of "You've got to save the self-destructive!" rhethoric, and as far as I care it's all ideologically motivated manipulation attempting to exploit the self-sufficient in favor of the self-destructive.

My point is that your response makes you one of the self-destructive, because if some significant sub-50% chunk of the population all die, even if you picked Red, you will get to sit there smugly assured of your intelligence while watching civilisation collapse.

Frankly, I very much do not care. I am responsible for myself and my child (who, no, will not get to decide on her own which button to press), and everyone else can die in a fire if need be, I won't gamble our lives on the galaxy-brained actions of others.

Is this stupid? Yes. If everybody were rational, we could all just pick Red and we'd be fine. But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.

I think the reason this hypothetical annoys me so much is that it's essentially set up to permit suicidally stupid people to morally and emotionally blackmail the rest of us by the threat of their own self-harm, and then self-righteously preen about it afterwards. It teaches bad - ruinous! - habits.

Real life coordination problems do not look like this! Real life coordination problems are made massively worse by this sort of intellectually cancerous SF Rat crap. Real life coordination problems instead look like "If you push red, the criminal goes to jail and then doesn't commit more crimes. If you push blue, we let them free and then they rape and murder a random person selected from among the reds and blues".

Unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that stupid, or irrational, or congenitally anti-social criminals need to go to jail, then you are a nation-wrecking calamity.

...sure?

I am fully in favour of sending criminals to jail. That is a different hypothetical, though.

Sorry, I meant to rephrase that so it was more clearly ranting at the hypothetical in general, and not you in particular.

I like this variation: same exact framing, but if you press blue, a random person dies, unless 50% or more press blue.

Morally, it seems like it has most of the same forces involved: there will be idiots or psychopaths who press blue, but if society can coordinate to get to 50%, no one dies. It adds some skin in the game for red: voting red doesn't give you safety, though it increases your chances of survival infinitesimally.

But I think this would drive more people to choose red, because it makes the sacrifice of voting blue not yourself but instead another person (extremely likely).

This is weird too me: if all lives are equally valuable, then which of the two scenarios shouldn't change whether you choose red or blue.

In that scenario, I’d still choose blue.

Still some (colorblind, dumb, or psychopathic) people will choose blue, some will choose red. If most of the remainder choose blue nobody dies, if most choose red a decent fraction of the population dies.

And I don’t know if enough people will choose blue (for this or another reason), but if red ends up winning, final society may be so apocalyptic that death isn’t. For example, maybe the person I would’ve saved (by pressing red) would’ve died quickly anyways in the aftermath.

And I don’t know if enough people will choose blue (for this or another reason), but if red ends up winning, final society may be so apocalyptic that death isn’t. For example, maybe the person I would’ve saved (by pressing red) would’ve died quickly anyways in the aftermath.

Not to pick on you, but I think this is a pretty weak line of argument, as unlike in the original problem, under this one the blue sacrifices are a random selection from all of humanity. So it's not a case of all the altruists killing themselves leaving behind a world full of psychopaths, it's a random cull of (at most) 50% of humanity, saints and sinners alike. Which is bad, but there are historical parallels, like the Black Death which killed 30-60% of the population in some places. Was life after the Black Death so bad as to not be worth living? Maybe for a modern human; we have grown pretty soft. But the recovery was reasonably swift.

I quite like this twist as it inverts the moral valence of the original problem. You can press blue out of pure self-interest (you might be one of the people who would've been killed if blue fails to clear 50%) or if you think risking innocents is justified for the greater good (on, e.g., utilitarian grounds). Otherwise, if you value someone's personal autonomy it's quite hard to justify pressing blue.

Back when this question first came out I unhesitantly said Red. Now that I am older and wiser I would likely choose blue, purely because of the framing of the question. Frame it as red:live vs blue:potentially die and I'd still choose red:live.

In addition to other comments about how phrasing the question biases the selection, I'm curious how much impact the red/blue color of the button are subconsciously influencing people's decision on what button to press.

Also, I believe that vote count was influenced by the reply to himself indicating "Blue voters hanging on by a thread currently." That might have given enough push for people to be willing to press the blue button to end up with the 42/58 split instead of something closer to 49/51 as it was before the comment was made.

I'm also curious if there is any data on the demographics of the people that would press each button. I think it's very likely women are much more likely to press the blue button, and men are more likely to press the red button. If the men who would press the red button was conscious of this, would they be more likely to change their mind? For example if 70% of women pressed the blue button but 80% of men pressed the red button, that would mean the surviving men now have to live in a world where there are only 3 women for every 8 men. For the red button pressors, does the possibility of having to live in such a world impact your decision in any way? If you knew this possibility was made aware to all red button pressors, do you think it would impact enough red button pressors to become blue button pressors that could change how you perceive blue button pressors?

What if the question was modified so that the death/survival put you into random groups of X number of people? Or more simply, rather than this being a game of everyone, this is a game of a set number of people e.g. 10,000 or even just 100. At a low enough number, your chances of dying if you pressed blue actually increases significantly, if we assume the 42.1% red to 57.9% blue ratio holds true (it likely won't and I already expressed some skepticism at that number being a "true" answer). I presume red button pressors will always press red regardless of the size of the group. Are there any blue button pressors that would press the red button in smaller group sizes? For red button pressors, what if it was a small group e.g. 100, and within that group is a friend or family member that you know would likely press the blue button. What if this button was presented strictly to people in your family (or people in your friend group). Would you be more willing to press the blue button?

What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind? There has to be a number, because if the requirement was 100% of blue button pressors must press blue for blue button pressors to survive, knowing there are people that would press the red button even if the number was only 50% required would make any rational actor press the red button instead.

If the group was smaller but still random, it wouldn’t change my reasoning.

If the % required to press blue was higher it would make my decision less sure (it’s already not very sure), until eventually I’d choose red.

What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind?

Here is my post about it from when it was last discussed 2 years ago:

Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.

If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.

In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.

It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.

I think 60% might be enough to make me switch, but this is influenced by having seen polling where even in randomized polls targeting the general public blue only gets 74% of the vote if you exclude those who responded "I don't know" and 63% if you don't. (I think the general public is more blue than internet voters because this is one of those cases where instincts usually give a good answer but then people can talk themselves out of it based on stuff like half-remembered game-theory puzzles.) The 60% threshold would have to induce 19% of blue voters to switch to drop from 74% to 60%, it's hard to guess if that would happen. Originally before seeing any polling I think I would stick with blue at 60% and switch at 70%. Of course this is assuming it is a surprise and there's no opportunity to do stuff like talk about it, orchestrate pro-blue government advertising campaigns, and hold public-results rehearsal polls beforehand. Very high thresholds would be viable if we could do stuff like that.

The crime example seems to imply the opposite of what you're getting at. Yes, crime is self-destructive, and it appears that the optimal way to deal with crime is to destroy criminals even further, hopefully deterring some, rather than pour the efforts of 50% of society into a vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right.

The key difference is the level of coordination required. Having police requires 50%+ coordination, otherwise they can just vote to legalize crime or have the police become an extension of organized crime. Similar to how the two arguments for red are the ultra-optimistic "100% can just save themselves by pressing red" and the pessimistic "we can't get to 50% coordination on blue so we should cut our losses", two parallel arguments against police would be "100% can just decide to not commit crime" and "we can't trust a 50% majority with the power of policing, we're better off with anarchy where everyone buys a gun and defends themselves even though there will be inevitable losses". Yes they aren't identical - for instance a draw for crime is people who (usually falsely) believe it will benefit themselves, while a draw for blue is people who believe it will benefit others - but they both reflect the difference between the unrealistic idealism of 100% coordination and the everyday practicality of 50% coordination.

vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right

Reeducating criminals to not be criminals doesn't solve criminality because even a tiny minority who don't listen to you can commit a lot of crime. We already teach the majority to not be criminals, it's just that the leftovers don't need a majority. Societies pull off that level of coordination all the time, even armies don't have 50% desertion rates. The button scenario doesn't have the opportunity to explicitly communicate and coordinate beforehand like the military does, but it's also an easier scenario where 50% provides 0 casualties, unlike knowing that coordination will still result in a large percentage getting shot.

That's a good enough margin for blue to take away most people's excuse for not voting blue.

It should converge to blue, because people have loved ones, and the recursive "what do I think they think I think they'll press" combined with enough shared cultural sentiment of "I wouldn't want to live in a world without my loved ones" = Blue wins

but personally, like @sun_the_second , if I'm being brutally honest with myself, I value my own survival above others'. I'm a rationalist, not a romantic. I'd pick Red. Extrapolated out, maybe Red wins

(no, I don't have kids)

The blue button is the optimal choice here. Either it gets 50% of the vote and nothing happens, or it fails and I get to go to Heaven, because risking my own life to save the lives of all the people who don't understand Monty Hall problems is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.

Question as phrased, blue, because lots of people will look at that question and press blue.

More evil variant:

You are told that you will be presented with two buttons, one red and one blue. If you press the red button, you will survive and no additional people will be told about the buttons due to your actions. If you press the blue button, the question will be presented to two other random people in the world (unless no people remain who have not been asked the question). Once this process completes, the votes will be tallied. If strictly more than 50.0% of the people asked pressed blue, everyone survives. Otherwise, everyone who pressed blue dies.

What's the ethical thing to do here?

Red because most people won’t understand the question and will just hear “you will definitely survive” and “nobody you know and love will probably be in the 2 random people asked next”. The original question works ‘better’ because it’s more intuitively understood by the average 85 IQ human being on earth.

Alright, variant for you:

Instead of being drawn from the global population, additional people are drawn from the set of people who have ever argued with someone about (explicitly) decision theory on the internet.

(also, I think I found a situation where FDT performs worse than naive CDT - naive CDT + not arguing about decision theory will always achieve outcomes that are strictly not worse than FDT in this scenario)

There are two ways to phrase the question. This way is phrased here basically demands Blue.

Rephrase it like this and I think there would be more Red pushers:

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. Everyone who presses the red button will live with no risk of death. If you press the blue button, you will die unless more than 50% of people also press the blue button.

Phrasing this way demonstrates that the blue button pressers are creating a risk of death which doesn't really need to be there.

But what about kids? I think adding a (those who are incompetent or underage will have their button pushed by their parent/guardian) parenthetical would change it even more.

Because consider the parent now. If you asked a parent, "Which button would you press for your kid, the one where they will always survive or the one where they might die?" I think most parents would press the red button without a second thought.

Basically this. If you don't immediately perceive that a vote for blue is a vote to be killed, perhaps you deserve that outcome.

This kind of clause defeats the point. The point is everyone gets the question at the same time and must decide instantly. In that context your choices are:

  1. Press Red, guarantee your survival, hope everyone you love also chooses Red or that enough people choose Blue. If Red wins, live with knowing you might have had the defining vote (assume nobody knows the exact split of the final outcome) however unlikely.

  2. Press Blue, either die instantly with a clean conscience or everyone lives.

Why do you assume it's an instant death and not a slow drawn out painful death?

How do you even know the button did anything then? That's just the normal end we all get.

I mean, if five minutes after pressing the button 40% of the worlds population started dying of radiation sickness and over the course of weeks to a couple months everyone slowly died that would be a sign it was the button.

Nobody can agree on all cause excess mortality statistics, and whether its a signal, noise, or potential causes. We already lived this.

Thanos snap people turn to dust or everyone pretends nothing happened.

I think there is a related interesting question here if red merely has a high probability of survival (99%, say), but blue has better/guaranteed odds if you solve the coordination problem.

The phrasing of "everyone is presented with the option to walk into a woodchipper (or not!), but it'll jam if 50%+ of the population all decide to walk into it together" is a similar phrasing that'll probably lead to fewer choosing blue.

This question feels like something out of a Kung Fu drama. The philosopher king knows red is the correct answer but because the people are dumb he must pick blue. End with thousands of swords flying towards him.

I think the difference is, a kid will see that a woodchipper is scary, but a kid might see a blue button as enticing.

I think most people who answer blue are thinking of children (maybe?) and most people who answer red assume children wouldnt' be asked.

most people who answer red assume children wouldnt' be asked.

I think a lot of people who would answer red assume children old enough to understand the question and to press a button would be asked, but that enough children could be convinced by their parents to seriously, not joke around, just press red. Now if you assume babies who don't understand the question and are unable to push the button as a deliberate act are included, then blue is a more reasonable answer.

I think adding a (those who are incompetent or underage will have their button pushed by their parent/guardian) parenthetical would change it even more.

Then I agree with you, but also, I’d say anyone “competent” in this situation (and not suicidal) would press red

I think that almost everyone with young children, and who can comprehend the question (can more or less than 50% of human adults even do that?), is pressing blue. I certainly am.

Aside from that though the real interesting part of this, which has mostly gone unexplored afaict, is how the question changes depending upon the group under consideration. If it were just my church, I'd have zero concerns about pressing blue. If it were my whole county I'd still feel pretty good about it.

But 'everyone in the world' forces me to ask some hard questions about the psychology of foreigners and I find myself a lot less certain.

(The other difficult question is which button I coach my older kids to push.)

I've also had a lot to think about since the first time we've had this question. My current honest thought process is that if the question is asked to "everyone in the world" I'd feel confident in pressing Blue. However if the question gets asked only to people in Quant Finance there's no way in hell I'm pressing anything other than Red.

My position, which seems to annoy both blues and reds, is that blue is the "altruistic" choice, but advocating or recruiting for blue is evil. If you want to press the probable-suicide button because there's a chance it might save some lives even though it certainly risks your own, OK, that's your business, and I can at least respect the courage that takes even if I think it's dumb and almost certainly doomed given the parameters of the hypothetical (it is asking literally everyone in the world, not just a Twitter bubble), but where it crosses the line is when you try to pressure others into pressing the suicide button alongside you through either manipulation or coercion: I have seen quite a few tweets about blues fantasizing about hunting down and purging all the reds once blue "obviously" win, which, to be frank, is not great optics.

Blues who threaten and coerce others into voting blue don't seem to seriously grapple with the possibility that blue won't win. They claim that reds have "blood on their hands", but convincing someone to vote blue and then losing is more fraught, morally, then opting to not partake. And the act of advocacy and coalition building is so obviously self-interested it diminishes the "altruism" in pressing blue.

Blues generally want to see themselves as saviors or martyrs, then fantasize about killing reds (or positing hypotheticals where the buttons are secretly switched and all the "anti-social reds" exterminate themselves, or where your choice of red or blue is actually made public); this is actually more cynical than the red perspective in many ways.

So there are broadly four categories of voters. You have people who advocate red and press red: their priors are that blue won't clear the threshold and pressing blue is suicidal. They argue for their family and friends to press red to save themselves. The presence of "randomizers" (toddlers, confused people, the colorblind or whatever) is unfortunate and it means that "everyone presses red" is not a possible outcome, but one can at least reduce the death toll by converting blues to reds.

Then you have the people who advocate blue and secretly press red. These are the "free riders" who benefit from the virtue signaling of claiming blue allegiance but don't actually bear any risk. I think this group is unambiguously the most evil, and, crucially, it's impossible to distinguish from a self-proclaimed blue-presser.

Then you have people who advocate blue and press blue. They want to build a large enough coalition to "win" and save everyone. This is noble in intent, but if the blue cause is actually doomed then they're just recruiting people into their suicide cult. Given that blue doesn't win in a landslide in an internet poll where the incentives are strongly oriented toward signaling cooperation and altruism, I'm not optimistic about blue's odds when the stakes are real. Plausibly these blues actually do believe that they can pressure and guilt enough reds to secure a victory. In any case, they're gambling with other people's lives and I think they're worse than "honest" reds.

The final group, which may not even exist, is the population that advocates red and then presses blue. This seems inherently self-defeating (as they're actively reducing the chance they survive) and suicidal, but if you're unsure whether blue will win and uncomfortable asking or coercing others to risk their lives, then this is at least a coherent position. This manifests as imploring your wife and children and anyone of sane mind to press red then solemnly entering the voting booth and pressing blue, expecting to die but unwilling to risk the possibility that your red vote could kill half of humanity. They would believe that pressing blue is a choice you have to make of your own volition: pressing blue because you're worried that the blue death squads will hunt you down in a post-button world isn't altruism, it's just a red who read the room.

Blues generally seem to believe that a blue victory is possible because humans are fundamentally good, or because we live in a high-trust society, but I'd argue that the highest trust society looks more like everyone independently choosing that last group -- advocating red then pressing blue because their conscience won't allow them any other option. A "fun" thing to consider is how many people might choose this path: how many of the filthy reds the blues fantasize about exterminating will waver in the moment and press blue? The discourse surfaces what people claim and the nature of the secret ballot means that just as the advocate-blue-press-reds are indistinguishable from blue's strongest soldiers, the reverse is also true.

I think that red pressers are unambiguously worse people than blue pressers. Blues are trying to make a better world - maybe they fail, but they're trying. Whereas those who press red put themselves first, even if that means it costs other people.

Agreed, but there's also a vast contingent of people who imagine they'd push blue right up until they're actually making the choice, at which point red becomes irresistable.

Yeah, I agree with that. It is only once you face the test in the moment that you truly know how you will respond. There are any number of things where I hope I might handle it in a certain way, but I won't know for sure until I come to the choice for real.

I disagree that simply persuading people to choose blue is unethical. Ultimately it’s their decision, and it’s not obviously wrong.

But

I have seen quite a few tweets about blues fantasizing about hunting down and purging all the reds once blue "obviously" win

A way to lose in real life is to get worked up over a silly hypothetical.

I disagree that simply persuading people to choose blue is unethical. Ultimately it’s their decision, and it’s not obviously wrong.

An example to demonstrate my point: there is a cult leader who has spiked the Kool-Aid with lethal poison. He genuinely, 100% earnestly believes that everyone who he convinces to partake of this drink will go to heaven; after he's tended to his flock he intends to follow them. Is it unethical to convince people to join him? He is genuinely acting in what he believes is their best interest. I think this figure is tragic, delusional, and dangerous, but, if he's a true believer, one could argue that he isn't unethical, though he is, at the bare minimum, projecting his utility function onto others.

Now, let's change the parameters: the cult leader is no longer certain that everyone who drinks the poisoned Kool-Aid will go to heaven. He's actually only about 50% sure. Maybe drinkers will go to heaven or maybe they'll just die. Nevertheless, he continues trying to convince everyone to take this gamble -- and he knows it's a gamble. Can he ethically advocate for Kool-Aid drinking? I think this is a decision that everyone should make for themselves after being informed of the risks, and that persuading people to drink the Kool-Aid (by asserting that their family and friends are going to drink it, for instance) is dubious and paternalistic. The strongest argument I think he is ethically permitted to make is something like, "I personally believe there is a 50% chance that drinking the Kool-Aid will get you into heaven; I believe the reward outweighs the risk and encourage anyone who agrees to follow me voluntarily."

This is not quite isomorphic to the button problem as posed but there are strong parallels. It is pretty close to the button problem where the results are already determined -- that is, no matter how many people you convince, the outcome won't change, and it's worth noting that this is the most common case: your advocacy is unlikely to change enough votes & minds to swing the results one way or the other. "The votes have already been tallied and one side has won by a significant margin: you and your family are the last ones left. How do you vote, and how do you instruct your family members to vote?"

I suspect people get worked up because they know that a person who presses red is also a person who is very likely to defect in other scenarios requiring everyone to work together for the good of the whole, and they want to get rid of those who would benefit at the expense of others. But as you said, it's a hypothetical and it's best not to get worked up about it.

Every poll on this I've seen has shown significant split between the two choices, at most maybe 70-30 one way. This has convinced me that, if this were done IRL, there's basically no way that Blue would get 50%, and I'm skeptical it'd get over 20%. If the voting is split when there are no consequences and you can choose whatever makes you feel virtuous knowing that you won't ever have to walk the talk, then in a situation of fatal consequences, there's simply no plausible way that the "don't die" button wouldn't have overwhelming victory. Given that, I don't see how I could justify adding one more body to the pile, instead of gritting my teeth and accepting the responsibility of keeping society running after it's been approximately decimated.

There's no person in the world I wouldn't prefer to outlive rather than die. In addition, many of my friends I've polled vote red and they're not that bad to spend the thanos snap apocalypse with.

If Twitter is that close, and assuming that Twitter selects for caving to social pressure and aggressively pro-social signaling, then I don't have high hopes blue wins overall.

Funny thing, I recall that last time this was dropped I was arguing for blue.

I have always found this question to mostly assess which individuals have such strong feelings of personal moral culpability that it will push them to make objectively irrational decisions. My answer is clearly and obviously red, because my individual vote does not count and is unlikely to sway anything when everyone in the world is taking the poll. That is 8.3 billion people. The outcome is dichotomous. There is, for all intents and purposes, zero chance my vote will influence the end result at all, and so it's literally just a choice between "Live/Possibly Die".

No-brainer, to be honest. The only way anyone can even begin to mount a convincing argument for blue is by explaining how my vote will have a material effect on the final outcome, and I doubt you can argue that.

My first immediate reaction is to press blue. My second reaction is that I hate voting. The larger the franchise, the more I'd push for me and everyone I know and love to vote red. If the people I love insist on voting blue, id do it too.

The obvious reason to choose blue is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose red?

is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose blue

My condolences. It must be a terrible fate knowing your friends and family are blue pushers.

The obvious reason to choose red is that many of your closest friends, family, people you love will choose red, and do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?

If everyone commits to pressing red, everyone lives. If you leave it to "push blue?" then there's a good chance people die. If you want to maximise your own chances of survival, push red.

do you really want to be a survivor in a world populated entirely by people who choose blue?

There is no world populated entirely by people who chose blue.

Obviously this is a coordination problem that presupposes that everyone is presented with the problem and must choose instantly without speaking to everyone they know and love (otherwise we could obviously all agree, as the human race, to choose red, and all definitely live).

It only works if you don’t know what your parents, children, spouse and friends have picked or will pick.

It's more that I was trying to point out that if you are a blue, then yeah you'll think reds are bad, just because they're red. But if you're a red, then you'll think blues are bad, for the same reason: just because they're blues. You need more of a convincing reason than "ugh, those people, do you really want to be in the same hemisphere as those stinky losers?"

If the majority of the population are going to be blue, maybe I would prefer to be dead!

If everyone commits to pressing red, everyone lives.

This is outside the bounds of the thought experiment (children, mentally infirm, etc.) and so irrelevant.

Does it specifically say children, the infirm, etc. are included? It just says "everyone who pushes this colour, this thing; everyone who pushes that colour, that thing". You can just as easily argue that children and the enfeebled are not going to be permitted to push buttons and so they don't come in to the experiment.

Indeed, if only the button pushers die, then everyone who doesn't push a button probably lives anyway, so red or blue doesn't apply to them.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

Here is the prompt again, emphasis mine.

Not accusing you of this but a whole lot of people are somehow reading it as 'mentally-competent adults' which is not what it says.

Right, it does say "everyone in the world" which presumably includes children. I think the problem is we instinctively go "well clearly not babies, babies can't press buttons" etc. and that leads to the "does this really mean children, how old is the child" and so on.

I feel like this line of thought has to be post-facto rationalization that people are doing to justify their choice to themselves. Yes, obviously it's inhuman and cruel to force children, the mentally handicapped, etc to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. It's also obviously inhuman and cruel to summon any significant fraction of the world's population to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. There is no scenario in which this game is being run ethically.

Oh, all these thought experiments are set up to run you along the rails to the One Acceptable Conclusion, so I don't put any credence in them and have no problem diverting to the No You Can't Choose That! option. If you leave it as an option, hell yeah I can choose that.

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