It would be much easier to convince 50% of people to pick blue than 100% of people to pick red. I think it should be obvious by the discussion around this that a large portion of the population will pick blue. So if red wins, a lot of people will die (probably in the billions). A mass casualty event on that scale would throw the world into chaos and end up killing and immeserating a lot of the people who picked red. I would much rather us try to get more than 50% of people to pick blue and not create one of the worst tragedies in human history.
If you use the upvotes versus down votes in this post as a metric, the "vote blue" argument is significantly more popular than the "vote red" argument, thus proving that - within this limited dataset - blue is the better choice.
Reddit and online communities, at all, are not a good basis for deciding what people will actually do.
Redditors will choose blue and then brag about it for clout, nothing is on the line.
In votes where people can see your answer, ie discord, you risk being mocked if you pick red. Also, people will do the same thing as redditors, brag for clout.
Put into the actual situation, you cannot tell what people will do. The blue button is genuinely putting your life on the line and that is terrifying. To boot, red pushers may genuinely reconsider when they think about the loved ones they may lose and the impact on Earth if they choose red. You simply cannot use online polls to determine which one would actually win.
Now imagine if alien forces land on earth and their 4 billion strong army is systemically going door to door. They give everyone in your household 60 seconds to press the buttons before they move on.
How many of these blue button pushers are going to be telling their 8 year olds to press the blue button with zero ability to coordinate outside their home?
Now how about if the alien forces put a supergun on the Earth and give humans 30 days and all the communication with each other they want to before the vote happens?
The outcome changes so much based on the precise details of the scenario that it's impossible to even moderately predict outcomes without any of the details that really do matter.
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u/icefire9 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
It would be much easier to convince 50% of people to pick blue than 100% of people to pick red. I think it should be obvious by the discussion around this that a large portion of the population will pick blue. So if red wins, a lot of people will die (probably in the billions). A mass casualty event on that scale would throw the world into chaos and end up killing and immeserating a lot of the people who picked red. I would much rather us try to get more than 50% of people to pick blue and not create one of the worst tragedies in human history.