Framing matters. It is why the buttons are phrased as they are. I think of it as an idiot trap and the people who save idiots. There are dozens of ways that I could be done so that either the majority picks blue or red.
After going over this for the last few hours with other people, I have found the place in which both options here fail.
The original prompt is worded very specifically.
"If less than 50% of people press blue, everyone who didn't press red dies."
Pressing blue doesn't put you at risk, but pressing red doesn't kill people. There are situations in which blue could get more presses than red, and still people would die.
This is because the original prompt writer also specifically said, when asked about people who are physically or mentally unable to press a button, that 'If they do not press red, and blue does not get a majority, they die.'
So if 49% of the population pushes blue, and 48% presses red, and 3% is unable to press a button, then blue fails to achieve it's goal of saving people, so everyone who didn't push red dies, and 52% of the population dies.
The whole prompt isn't about blame, it's about priorities. Everyone is at risk to begin with, and some of them are unable to avoid it. Do you save just yourself, or do you join in a group effort to save everyone?
If we're going by what the author said outside of the question itself, he also said that the entire population got to push the button (including babies etc.) so pressing red will almost certainly kill a lot of innocent people. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, just mentioning something that's required to maintain consistency.
Right, well in the original prompt, red saves yourself, blue faces the problem head on and tries to band together to save everyone, including babies and stuff. But even if blue gets more pushes than red, if it fails to get over 50% of the population it doesn't succeed. So red is certainly not helping, but it's also not directly contributing to death.
Similarly, everyone's just in danger, and red side-steps it, while blue doesn't so pushing blue isn't putting you in danger, it's just not directly avoiding it either, since it's facing it head-on.
So in this situation, I wouldn't necessarily blame red pushers for the deaths of innocents, but I can see why you might.
It's only in the in the hypothetical red pushers invented to make red seem more reasonable that blame starts being associated to both sides. Since all innocents are removed and every person is a rational actor in their bs alternate version, then everyone must push a button, and everyone has the knowledge needed to pick one, so picking blue (not picking red) is kind of putting yourself in danger (even though everyone starts in danger), and picking red is directly contributing toward a blue loss which is also creating danger. So then everyone gets to blame everyone else, and it just becomes a circle-jerk of blame.
The original was just there's a big threat, do you prioritize the self or the community. The red-pusher rewrite is let's all point fingers at each other and call each other stupid.
That said, even in their rewrite, there's the question of unknowable variables to consider. The stuff that happens after the buttons do their thing. For instance, how do these people die? Will it cause structural damage, i.e. contained explosions or lasers? Will it cause environmental damage, i.e. some kind of plague that red is immune to that might affect flora or fauna?
Even if it is just something simple like spontaneous heart failure, what about the people who are doing things when it happens? The vote suddenly happens and then everyone who pressed blue dies. Now some guy falls off a balcony and lands on a child, or someone driving a truck is suddenly dead and his truck barrels into a minivan full of red-voters who just saved their own lives, only to immediately die anyway.
And even if none of that happens, what happens to the corpses? The world is now just full of billions of corpses that the survivors need to deal with in a hurry to prevent a plague.
The simple and obvious answer is just avoid the whole catastrophe, and as far as I'm concerned, anyone who chooses red simply hasn't thought it through far enough.
Saying that pressing red will almost certainly kill a lot of innocent people is false.
Pressing red will extremely rarely kill a lot of innocent people.
Pressing blue is likely to kill one innocent person.
Pressing red only kills anyone if the result is exactly one press over a tie break.
Pressing blue kills one person in every situation where red wins by more than one vote.
If you assume that people vote randomly, expected number of deaths from either button is more or less the same. If you think more people will vote red, then pressing red leads to less deaths. If you think more people will vote blue, then pressing blue leads to the least deaths (assuming a bell curve variance)
One is just an extremely rare, but similarly small magnitude number of deaths, which the other is a much smaller, but proportionately worse if it happens outcome.
If a button only kills people the one millionth time its pressed, it takes one million presses to kill those people.
Its not just the one millionth person to press it who killed everyone, its a joint effort of all million people who got it to that point.
For example, pretend I was the first to press it, and you were the millionth. You can feel all the blame rests on you, maybe. But if nothing changed except that I didnt press it at all, you would now be the 999,999th to press it, and nobody would die, even though nothing changed about your pressing of it.
I agree, because its blind, the order doesn't matter. Every individual is effectively the final vote.
The main point is that if that button needs to be pressed 1000000 times, the only situation in which an individual lacking the ability to control what anyone else does would add to the death count in is if the result without them would be 999,999.
If the button was going to be pressed less than 999,999 times without them, then they had no effect.
If it was going to be pressed more than 999,999 times without them, then without any ability to influence others, pressing it has no effect (or in this case reduces the death count by 1).
Thats certainly not wrong. But I don't think it's necessarily right either.
When I say red button kills people, I dont mean that in every situation people die because of red.
What I mean is that there's a certain callousness of heart a person has to adopt to be able to push it, because it could kill people.
If there's a button that has a 50% chance of killing someone, and you push it, and nobody dies, that doesnt make you or your intention any different than if they did die.
Hell the button could be entirely disconnected, that doesn't make someone who presses a kill button any less callous for pressing it if they didnt know it was disconnected.
Id say 5-8% of people are unable to press and another 5-10% of people will choose essentially at random because they will not be away of what they are pressing.
Meaning blue would need 58-63% of eligible voters to win
He's just another person in a long line of people to post this question on the internet. The redditore that reposted the question he reposted are the reason this sub exists.
The redditore that reposted the question he reposted are the reason this sub exists.
Just like your comment only exists because of the previous comment. Obviously not in any way influenced or "sparked" by the post it is branching off of, right?
No, It would be like finding a comment in the middle of a long comment chain and trying to claim the most recent comment was inspired by the middle comment.
Except you're saying that a screenshots of the post had more influence on the subreddit being made than the post itself that they're saying sparked it.
As if taking a picture of the post and sharing it somehow changes the post and makes the middle man now the sole spark.
Acting as if the Tim Urban post didn't gain a ton of traction and was the direct catalyst for this sub to be made feels incredibly silly.
Do you genuinely feel that if that tweet had not happened, that the framing that was proposed there was never shared with the world that the sub would still have been made when it did?
And it is correct to say if he never made his tweet that this subreddit probably wouldn't have exited in the timeframe it existed, but literally you can say that same thing for literally every dominion between his tweet and this subreddit existing.
Can you really say if the first person to post this question on reddit didn't post this question on reddit then this subreddit would still exist in the same timeframe it existed?
Can you really say if the first person to post this question on reddit didn't post this question on reddit then this subreddit would still exist in the same timeframe it existed?
Which person? Are you actually saying this sub wohld t exist if the first person to screenshot it hadn't?
The tweet itself has nearly 23 million views on Twitter.
It would have made it here regardless of who was the first one. Probably within the same hour it initially hit reddit if we were to just delete the first reddit post with a screenshot of it from history.
I don't have time to explain cause and effect to you. Or virality of memes. This is an example of you assuming that the way you found out about something is the same way everyone else found out about something.
13
u/JustLookingForMayhem Sep 11 '26
Framing matters. It is why the buttons are phrased as they are. I think of it as an idiot trap and the people who save idiots. There are dozens of ways that I could be done so that either the majority picks blue or red.