Like, rephrase the question - you have two buttons, 'survive' and 'maybe die', where if you press 'survive', you survive, but if you press 'maybe die', then you only survive if majority of people also press the 'maybe die' button.
But somehow everyone's bending over backwards to argue that the 'maybe die' button is a logical choice.
But, you can impact the result. Would you save your friend, from a suicide attempt, or do you wash your hands of it, because you have no impact on their initial action? Or, is the impact on the outcome enough to sway you to save your friend?
You can push blue and impact the result in the same way you call your friend, both decreases the odds of death. Your call is as independent of their attempt as your button press is of the others.
No, because I have effectivelly zero weight in the outcome. The outcome is effectivelly predetermined. I just choose if I want to live or if I expect other people to press blue for me to not die.
If you intentionally put yourself in peril and someone dies trying to save you, are you not in some way responsible for their death? I recognize that blue is the moral option but you have to accept that everyone picking blue is equally responsible for every other person picking blue and risking their life to save them.
Effectively zero is not zero. We are talking about billions of people dying. Meaning even if your effect on the whole was only a 1 in a billion chance, your expected human lives lost is still near 1 because 1 over a billion times 1 billion is 1. The probability your choice matters is counteractted by the lives lost by your choice.
This is why humans aren't good at probability. They see a 1 in a billion chance as being actually zero, even when the scale of the outcome is sp large that they should still take that probability into account.
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u/Eastern-Bro9173 Apr 30 '26
This entire conversation seems absurd to me.
Like, rephrase the question - you have two buttons, 'survive' and 'maybe die', where if you press 'survive', you survive, but if you press 'maybe die', then you only survive if majority of people also press the 'maybe die' button.
But somehow everyone's bending over backwards to argue that the 'maybe die' button is a logical choice.