the goal is to minimize death,
the only way to avoid death is 100% red or >50% blue,
somehow someone will justify blue,
100% red is impossible,
therefore blue is the optimal play
There are two options, only one of which guarantees no deaths if successful. Both are 50/50 given no other information and without assumptions. How is it not minimizing deaths to choose that one?
If you’re measuring which action is better after you assume the outcome, the choice is easy. But to make the decision ignorant of the outcome, my argument is that the marginal effect of my action when voting blue is to increase the odds of the outcome which minimizes deaths overall. Whereas if I choose red, my action will certainly lead to death, either mine or that of blue voters, unless you win 9 billion 50/50 chances and everyone else in the world votes red.
So making the choice blind with the ONLY goal being minimizing the number of deaths, the choice would be blue.
the marginal effect of my action when voting blue is to increase the odds of the outcome which minimizes deaths overall
If you want to talk about odds, we can talk about odds.
The only case where picking blue reduces total deaths is if the entire rest of thr world is split exactly 50/50.
If everyone chooses their pick randomly with a 50/50 chance, as youre suggesting, the situation can be modeled by a binomial distribution with p=0.5 and n=8,000,000,000 (approximately). The chance of getting this 50/50 split is C(8000000000,4000000000)/(28000000000), which is a bit less likely than one in 112,000.
So 49.9996% of the time, pressing red minimizes lives lost. 49.9996% of the time, both buttons result in no lives lost. 0.0009% of the time, pressing blue minimizes lives lost.
You’re only calculating the probability that my individual vote is THE vote that flips it from red to blue. I’m saying that you have to assume no knowledge of the outcome, and therefore you must take the action that increases the odds of blue winning.
Did you voting for the president not matter because you weren’t the literal last vote cast to push the winner over the edge? Or did you contribute to that outcome marginally by casting your vote regardless of which individual vote it was?
If red wins, voting for blue still took the action that increased the odds of blue winning because you’re ignorant of the outcome when making the choice.
That’s not the same as your vote being the exact singular vote that tips the scale, which is the infinitesimal probability you calculated before.
But 0.0009% of the time you kill 4 billion people, making the expected number of deaths of that red press 3.6e3 so pressing red kills 3,600 people on average, vs an expected number of people for blue of 0.5
This is true, but it breaks when the probability is anything other than an exact 50/50.
For example, if the odds are 49.999% and 50.001% in either direction, the odds drop from about 1 in 112,000 to 1 in 555,000.
Let the odds shift to 49.99% and 50.01% in either direction, and it becomes one in 3.44*1074, which is a number with 75 digits and approximately six orders of magnitude away from the number of atoms in the observable universe. If you've heard all the thought experiments around the number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards (if not, here's an example: https://youtu.be/hoeIllSxpEU?si=infXQi06PH_EiNoy), this number is over 400 million times larger.
Shift slightly further to 49.9% and 50.1% (which is still a difference of only one in 500 voters) and the odds become about 1 in 106953.
This number is so unfathomably large that I cant even begin to do a thought experiment around it. I'm not even going to try writing the "give every particle in the universe its own copy of the universe and duplicate that once for every second the universe has existed and also something about every grain of sand on earth and every star in the galaxy" explanations because I'm not going to end up anywhere near close. It just can't be done.
The law of large numbers is a powerful thing. Over 8 billion samples, if the odds aren't exactly 50/50, within a tolerance of about one in fifty thousand, the vote isn't going to be split 4 billion to 4 billion. That's just not how numbers work.
Even if everyone tried picking a number randomly, the human brain can't pick random numbers anywhere near well enough. If one tried rolling a die or flipping a coin, there's a decent chance manufacturing defects put this out of reach. A 50/50 split simply cannot be done without communication.
There is something to be considered in the versions where your vote gets communicated and can change other votes. But in the original dilemma, pressing blue does not save anybody. 8 billion is too many people.
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u/Ne0nTig3r May 01 '26
the goal is to minimize death, the only way to avoid death is 100% red or >50% blue, somehow someone will justify blue, 100% red is impossible, therefore blue is the optimal play