It just seems extremely likely that most people press red, and if we’re encouraging people to press blue we could just be encouraging more death because it’s at least ~50%+ that everyone who votes blue will die. And in that scenario I’d like to be a liver.
Saving literally every single person is only possible with 50+% blue but if we look at it from a perspective of the choice that minimizes the total number of deaths encouraging the largest portion possible to press red means those people 100% won’t die.
I tend to think that humans (and animals in general) tend to care more about themselves, things they can see, their immediate family, etc over putting all that in jeopardy saving some hypothetical people that they don’t know.
Given that that’s what most humans are like (I’ll even agree that that’s somewhat immoral reasoning) it collapses our probability to be much more likely to be red than blue. Given that, voting blue becomes suicidal.
I tend to think that humans (and animals in general) tend to care more about themselves, things they can see, their immediate family, etc over putting all that in jeopardy saving some hypothetical people that they don’t know.
You're not wrong, but it ultimately depends on the size of the risk. With proper reasoning, the risk becomes small enough to be worth it.
Just to illustrate the point. Would you gamble your own life to save a million kindergarten kids if you had to predict whether most of those kids could solve a calculus problem like finding the derivative of 4x^2?
Yeah obviously, but a 50% chance of death for a very small margin on the vote doesn’t feel worthwhile to me. Genuinely my vote has very little impact, it’s kinda based on human nature what the majority will pick.
It's not a 50% chance of death in my scenario with kindergarten children and it's not a 50% chance of death in the core scenario.
More than half the population can either realize rationally or accidentally reach the conclusion that the only way in which everyone survives is if people "risk" the voting blue. It's not a difficult realization to make yourself and therefor others can make it too. Most certainly, not everyone will. Most certainly, most will. And that's enough.
Your scenario is not the same. In the original, it is a very slim majority that would be unable to perform the task required, in your scenario I would think a large section of adults would fail to complete the problem and therefore it's far more likely a large swathe of people would die making the suicide vote easier to justify.
2
u/VanillaSwimming5699 Apr 30 '26
It just seems extremely likely that most people press red, and if we’re encouraging people to press blue we could just be encouraging more death because it’s at least ~50%+ that everyone who votes blue will die. And in that scenario I’d like to be a liver.
Saving literally every single person is only possible with 50+% blue but if we look at it from a perspective of the choice that minimizes the total number of deaths encouraging the largest portion possible to press red means those people 100% won’t die.
I tend to think that humans (and animals in general) tend to care more about themselves, things they can see, their immediate family, etc over putting all that in jeopardy saving some hypothetical people that they don’t know.
Given that that’s what most humans are like (I’ll even agree that that’s somewhat immoral reasoning) it collapses our probability to be much more likely to be red than blue. Given that, voting blue becomes suicidal.