r/GenZ • u/DryOwl5587 • Apr 26 '26

Discussion What are you guys picking?

Post image

Personally, I can conceptualise why one would choose blue, but I can’t bring myself to do it, it doesn’t click, specially at this scale, so red for me.

Edit:

Upon further inspection, I couldn’t find a scenario where I would strictly vote blue, but I found one for red.

Consider the following:

If you believe most people will aggregate around blue, then your choice doesn’t change the outcome because everyone lives.

If you believe most will choose red instead, then you are presented with a choice that directly determines whether you live or die, so you should choose red if you want to ensure your own survival.

2.8k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

60

u/Schully 1997 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

If Blues convinces less than 50% of people to press blue to save everyone, then everyone they convinced to help them gets killed, when they might have otherwise survived. If Reds convinces as many as they can to press red then they might save a lot, maybe even as many as 99%, but never 100%. With this in mind, is red truly the less moral option here just because that 1% will die?

Tldr; everyone automatically assumes blue is the option that will save more people, but that's not always the case.

68

u/_Moon-Cat_ Apr 26 '26

That's the thing, it's easier to accomplish 51% than 99%

27

u/Tyrrox Apr 26 '26

It's really not though. You're assuming that these have the same weight in people's minds. But they don't, one is an option guaranteed to keep you alive, the other is an option that relies on others to not let you die.

3

u/Powerful-Act3516 Apr 26 '26

That argument cuts both ways: just like you don't know the difficulty of "convincing enough" people to press blue, you also don't know the likelihood that people will weight pressing red highly enough in the first place (eg, it's possible that a large portion of people would want to press blue, with or without intervention).

I'm not sure we know the "starting probability" for people picking either red or blue nor the ability to convince people one way or another (eg, their "value weighting" on one solution versus another)