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This has resurfaced and been trending for a while
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:
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
Thanos snapping a decent amount of the population (including random children, and biased towards selflessness) will probably overall negatively affect society
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)
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.
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.
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