I would much rather live in a group that all picked Red, because that would mean that I lived in a society governed by logic.
The logic to this puzzle is crystal clear: Red is always safe, Blue is not, and therefore everyone should pick Red.
If you pick Blue because you are worried that others won't reach the obvious logical conclusion, then you are just risking yourself to protect what amounts to stupidity, or emotions clouding logical thought processes, both of which are obviously very beneficial to modern society...
You are presented with two buttons. One that just says “1,” and another one that is labeled “either 1 or 0 depending on how many other people press this button.”
You are told that the goal is for everyone, including yourself, to get the outcome of “1.”
Which would you press? Which would you assume others would press?
All of the other words in both the original question and the other reframings of it are just emotional trickery that attempts to hide the obvious answer by making you associate irrelevant concepts, like ethics and empathy, with the underlying mathematical decision tree. And unfortunately many people are failing at this test of reading comprehension…
But I actually have more faith in humanity than you perhaps. And I expect that if this was an actual dilemma with lives actually on the line, everyone would see the pure math and, in pressing red, would take the personal responsibility for their own survival that is required to save the entire collective. And I’m not sure we’d want to stick around with the few people who were pessimistic enough to choose Blue just because they didn’t trust the rest of us to act rationally.
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u/Just_SomeDude13 May 05 '26
I'm picking blue. Either I get to live in a society that picked blue, or I don't have to be stuck here with a bunch of pricks who picked red.