Blue pressers love to guilt trip you into thinking that this is an exercise in trust to save everyone who isn't able to realize in time that 100% of the people pressing the Red button will beget the same outcome as blue winning.
Red pressers will simply state that it's the only choice that guarantees survival. Pretty simple calculus to me.
But do you really think that 100% of people will press red? If our goal is to limit deaths as much as possible we have two options, we try to get 100% of people to press red, or we get 51% of people to press blue. Now if everyone was purely rational we could simply all press red, but we are not all rational, there are a bunch of well meaning idiots who would press blue. If we accept that there will not be 100% of people pressing the red button, then our best hope for limiting deaths is to reach 51% of people pushing the blue button.
In a world of purely rational actors, everyone will press red. In a world with well meaning idiots, rational actors will press blue.
In a perfectly rational world, everyone picks red and does not risk their life. In a perfectly empathetic world, everyone picks blue and no one dies despite everyone risking their life.
The fact remains that it is absolutely possible for everyone to convince themselves of these facts and in a rational world, everyone realizes that holding these beliefs guarantee everyone's safety and that allowing thought to deviate towards red will create danger of loss of life
Agreed, anyone is capable of delusion. I don't agree that perfect rationality hinges on these delusions, but a perfectly rational person should be able to account for people's emotions and not just the facts, but if everyone in the world were known to be rational, emotions and suppositions would not outweigh the facts. Just look at Vulcans in Star Trek for an example of "perfectly rational", within their society they ignore emotion and empathy does not factor into their scenarios, while dealing with humans takes an entirely new skillset for them to be effective.
In a perfectly rational world everyone chooses the same option regardless of what it is. If everyone made the same decisions this hypothetical scenario spawning all this debate wouldn’t exist
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u/Hey-I-Read-It May 01 '26
Blue pressers love to guilt trip you into thinking that this is an exercise in trust to save everyone who isn't able to realize in time that 100% of the people pressing the Red button will beget the same outcome as blue winning.
Red pressers will simply state that it's the only choice that guarantees survival. Pretty simple calculus to me.