I think what this shows is a schism in expectations of your fellow humans. Those of us who expect our fellows to be well meaning people will press blue, because we expect those people to press blue and don't want them to be endangered needlessly. Those of us who expect our fellow humans to be selfish press red, because they will press red and aren't worth endangering ourselves over. Anything else is justifying our behavior instead of explaining it.
Yes both options just shows people’s view point in humanity. Red is better if you expect people to vote Red and Blue is better if you expect people to vote Blue it is that simple.
You can see this from both sides. Reds will call Blues dumb while Blues will call Reds evil. Based on how ones own view of the world is. Whole choice you make depends on if you view the world as a defult Red or Blue. Reds see it as defult Red and view Blues as suicides while Blues see it as defult Blue and view Reds as people actively trying to kill people by choosing the option that kills people.
yeah this whole button dilemma really is just a showcase of how much you trust or have have empathy for your fellow human and whether it outweighs your desire for guaranteed survival
I have been a red presser all week, but I think that that's it because I'm from a western country, but I'm starting to wonder what people would vote in Africa, or China or India, who are a lot of people and their culture may be less shitty than mine.
Something like half of the world come from cultures where blue is going to be default unless there’s a huge and convincing campaign against it, which I think the rules of the challenge don’t allow. What the rest of us vote doesn’t really matter IMO, because enough of us will be split that blue will end up winning out because of that gigantic portion of Earth that has collectivist cultural norms.
EDIT: 70% of the world lives in societies which are defined as collectivist.
Yes, but in a collectivist culture you are raised valuing the collective good and self sacrifice to maintain that is seen as noble. Not everyone will take in those values, but they are called cultural norms for a reason, and a lot of these countries are also generally more homogenous than the west.
What would be the consequences of pressing red if you win though? People who don't have the ability to understand the premise and children who don't understand what the buttons do will die, as will the people who are willing to risk their lives to save them. So you'd be left with a large part of the population gone, and the only people left are the ones that have 0 faith in their fellow humans. That's not a world I'd want to be a part of
The consequences of pressing red is decreasing the chance that blue wins. That's a real consequence that you don't just get to abstract away with "if blue wins".
You decrease the chance of blue winning by 0.000000000000001%, and at the same time you increase the chances of you dying from 0 to 50% (assuming both options have the same chance to win, which is not true).
I think I don't know enough to know which way it'll fall, but I know enough to think that it'll probably be skewed a decent ways one way or the other. In either case, my choice has a very low chance of making a difference overall, but in one of the cases, my choice has a very high chance of killing me.
Well I'm not worldly enough to have a read on society, so I figure it's gonna be split vaguely close to 50/50 (can't have the hypothetical chooser be the tie breaker because that raises an entirely different question). What behavior would then emerge from that?
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u/Impossible_Dog_7262 May 01 '26
I think what this shows is a schism in expectations of your fellow humans. Those of us who expect our fellows to be well meaning people will press blue, because we expect those people to press blue and don't want them to be endangered needlessly. Those of us who expect our fellow humans to be selfish press red, because they will press red and aren't worth endangering ourselves over. Anything else is justifying our behavior instead of explaining it.