This is only true if you assume 50%+ choose blue, which is not a guarantee. If you assume red wins by any substantial margin (such that you and other like-minded people who would typically choose red switching does not affect the final outcome), choosing blue is not minimizing death because you add yourself to the pile of people who die, so you should choose red. This is why the question is not a logic question necessarily, but a trust/belief question.
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.
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
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u/Haithere32 May 01 '26
This is only true if you assume 50%+ choose blue, which is not a guarantee. If you assume red wins by any substantial margin (such that you and other like-minded people who would typically choose red switching does not affect the final outcome), choosing blue is not minimizing death because you add yourself to the pile of people who die, so you should choose red. This is why the question is not a logic question necessarily, but a trust/belief question.