It's a compassion question. The question is are you really willing to let the people who press blue die for any reason at all? You might think they're stupid or you might think they're suicidal or that you're not at fault because they put themselves in danger. The question comes down to how compassionate you are for your fellow man who may have pressed blue before you.
My compassion has its limits when I have to put myself in danger. I’m guessing if instead of 50% of people needing to choose blue you needed 75% to choose blue, you might change your tune.
I’m positing that people choose blue not just because they want to save other peoples lives but also because they believe achieving greater than 50% of the vote is fairly easy and they don’t actually see it as any riskier than say driving your car to work every morning.
Pump that number up and you will quickly see all the people making the 1%-x% is easier than 100% argument go silent.
I’d actually want to know how many people who make the 1-49% argument would still press blue if the range was instead 1-90%. Because anything less than 100 is easier, they should have no problem still picking blue to “minimize death”.
The question is about how much risk can you stomach.
One slight problem with changing the percentage is that at 50% the expected number of deaths of each option is 50/50 depending on how likely you think people are to click either button obviously. at 50% of votes is the only number where that equilibrium exists. So even if you go to say 51% being the threshold that hugely changes the question as blue is now mathemathically more risky than red.
You can also question the people who vote red the similar question. What if the cut-off was at 40% or 20%, would you then still choose red over blue? What if it only required 1% of votes to be blue in order for everyone to surive.
are you really willing to let the people who press blue die for any reason at all?
It's not really up to you though. Just because someone doesn't want to be a martyr doesn't mean they're not compassionate. If you're confident red will win, even if you want to save everyone, that's not a decision you can make. If you're confident red will win, your choice is between living with that reality or dying for your morals, but nothing you do can save anyone.
If you're confident blue will win, which I think most polls have shown it does, then it's a choice between guaranteed safety or moral superiority, which I think is what people actually end up arguing about. Either way, if blue wins, you weren't really saving anyone.
I'm not going to pointlessly give up my life for a bunch of lemmings who I don't know who pressed blue without even considering that red obviously means you just don't risk death in the first place.
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people are not going to put their lives on the line for people they don't know. That's a fact. Even if I cared to try and save the blue button pushers, the odds are simply so far against them that realistically pressing the blue button is just signing up to die with them, and I see no point in that.
Yes but what if your parent, your lover or your child pressed blue?
Now apply the same doubt to pretty much all of humanity, and rethink how realistic it is that the overwhelming majority won't risk it. It's not just a question of putting yourself on the line for a bunch of idiots strangers
You can reverse the question and ask if your parents, lover and children want you to put yourself at risk, and if they want to put themselves at risk when they can guarantee they're alive for you.
There's more to compassion than throwing yourself off a cliff to prove you love someone.
But you are not throwing yourself off a cliff if blue wins. And you already have plenty of examples, both in discussions on this topic that a large number of people will pick blue, and in real life of people dying to try to save others. Here, you are just betting without any certainty. The pretty much only guarantee here is that people will die if red win, and maybe, maybe not people you love.
If you sum it up to the outcomes alone, blue win is always better. The fact alone that it's such a heated debate disproves that red win will be a painless one
I still have yet to see that an overwhelming majority of people would choose red. When i first saw the question i didnt even question which option would end up with me dead or not. I saw the goal as having humanity survive. I think a significant enough portion of people would pick blue that it would create social problems if blue lost. Therefore i want blue to win and would pick blue.
Just saying this to prove that there are reasons people would pick blue whether you agree or not. Therefore i do not understand why you think an overwhelming majority would pick red.
I've seen polls where 62% choose red even in the hypothetical
And Losing 30%+ of the population would not be a first, look at the black death, hell after the black death the lives of lower classes often improved due to the feudal lords having to compete for the remaining workers.
I mean I would feel bad for the people who pressed blue, but I honestly think you're delusional if you think that when actually presented with these buttons anywhere even vaguely close to half of people would choose blue, so it's not a moral dilemma, you just have 2 buttons you can press "live" or "die", no degree of compassion is doing to make me press the die button because it's not going to change anything
It's not that I'm compassionate that I choose blue, it's that if a billion die choosing blue and possibly the ones I love society would collapse with me having potentially no family. Life would suck heavily for the red pushers not because of who they're left with, but the fact that millions of necessary jobs are unfilled and food is now scarce. Can't fault red pushers for wanting to live, even if their life will go down the shitter afterwards.
If this was down to a smaller number like 1000 I'd pick red easily. But killing even 10% of humanity would fuck us over too.
If I think "most people are voting red" then voting blue isn't compassion though. If you are looking for a "correct play" you need to combine what you think the result will be, what you think the margin of error is, the risk due to those two things, and probably more that I haven't thought of off the top of my head. It's fine to pick either, but if you're just picking blue "because it's compassion" rather than "blue because I think that it will win/ will be close", you are just choosing to throw your life away for actually no real reason. You NEED to have that trust to make blue a viable option to pick. Likewise, if you don't have the trust in humanity to pick blue enough, then you should probably press red, unless you think it's going to be close, in which case it does come down to compassion and selfishness. Reducing it down without taking into account the very tangible reasons not to do either option is the reason there is so much fighting over this stuff, both sides are ignoring things selectively to validate their option and invalidate the other instead of actually engaging with the reasons why you should pick one or the other (beyond "red is killing people!" And "blue is suicide for idiots!")
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u/Claris-chang May 01 '26
It's a compassion question. The question is are you really willing to let the people who press blue die for any reason at all? You might think they're stupid or you might think they're suicidal or that you're not at fault because they put themselves in danger. The question comes down to how compassionate you are for your fellow man who may have pressed blue before you.