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Different framing: The only option that leads to a statistical chance of suicide though is blue.
Being murdered is not suicide.
Just because someone jumped infront of the train and died doesn't mean the conductor is a murderer.
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One button means you almost certainly contributed to homicide, since the odds of everyone pressing red is essentially 0%. The other one does not contribute to homicide. The right answer, by the way, is to not press either button. "The only winning move is not to play."
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide: There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies. You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruis…
If a rigid airship is being blown about, and might be unmoored, a trained ground crew will jump on the lines because with enough weight they can save the ship and its crew. If too few grab a line, it will unmoor. If you are on the ground crew, and you let go of the line because you are worried about your own life, are you complicit in the deaths caused by the ensuing airship crash?
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> I fail to see how anyone could choose blue Depends on the scenario… or the number of people in the experiment. A sufficiently large number of people will guarantee votes in both bins. The specific scenario (reading this outside of a vacuum) will also have knock-on effects. Eg: reading this into the current political landscape in the US vs reading this into another toy problem about jumping off a cliff or not will h…
The article makes a good point with their reframing. "Give everyone a magic gun. They may choose to shoot themselves in the head. If more than 50% of people choose to shoot themselves, all the guns jam. The person also has the option to put the gun down and not shoot it." The "dilemma" is asking to what lengths we should go to save people choosing to commit suicide, and does that change when they are unintentionally…
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Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2) Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand. (…
but in the original dilemma you have an advantage by taking a choice at the disadvantage of the other. But there is no advantage here to pick blue, nobody should pick blue because if we all pick red we all win.
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I would personally assert it's foolish to pretend a species can survive without empathy and mutual aid. That's certainly not how humanity (or most, if not all, species) developed so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
"Empathy" isn't a binary in this context. You can exercise empathy and aid your community by making sure everyone you know votes red. That's the kind of cooperation that humans have evolved with. What you're talking about is undifferentiated, universal empathy, where someone would be willing to risk the lives of those close to them for a greater chance to help those who are outside their immediate reach to persuade.…
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Being murdered is not suicide.
And where in the original post is specified who does "the murdering"? As far as I see blue pressers are explicitly putting themselves in harms way and red pressers have fuck all to do with it. Just because someone jumped infront of the train and died doesn't mean the conductor is a murderer.
Train conductors and companies take reasonable precautions to avoid killing people - they aren't indifferent to it. If they just built tracks and started running trains on them without taking measures to avoid mowing people down they absolutely would be guilty of murder.
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others. The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics. It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just a…
Please keep in mind that the association of colour to political wing is radically different, even the exact opposite, in other countries.
> It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way.
I don't see anybody arguing this. The entire point of the red strategy is that it is not dependent on how many press red. There are people who predict that everyone will independently come to the same conclusion (it's wrong to assume the entire population will be rational). That is not the same thing.
The argument, as far as I can tell, is that in the world where blue pressers failed to get a majority, red pressers are not responsible for those deaths. They were free to choose red, and had no real incentive not to choose red beyond sympathy for other blue pressers.
But also, in the world where blue pressers do get a majority, red pressers don't suffer any consequences for the "betrayal", as described. It would have to literally be a fate worse than death for choosing blue to make any sense. (In the limit, if we imagine that blue pressers will, if successful, enact their revenge and kill all the reds, then the game merely becomes symmetric and the goal is just to be in the majority.)
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The only option that leads to a statistical chance of murder though is red.
Different framing: The only option that leads to a statistical chance of suicide though is blue.
A single button labeled "Murder" appears out of nowhere appears, and if more than the majority of people press it, then the people who didn't press will die.
I'm pretty sure most people would just ignore and keep going with their day since why would everyone in the world be so cheesed to press the murder button?
Anyways, these are all reductive scenarios once outside of game theoretics (like this one partially is) - I find this ragebait question really funny because every minor reframing shows significant biases in how you map the theory of mind for the public, and makes the reductive question entirely different.
These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US. In the world where I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
For that matter, one can argue that only in the world where blues get the slimmest possible 50%+1 majority can anyone feel like a "hero". Whenever the blue majority is greater than that, any individual blue can say "okay, but I could have pushed red and the result would have been the same".
For those arguing for red button pushing, the dominant register is intelligence and rationality. Terms such as "dumb", "idiots", "unintelligent", "naive", and "irrational", are used to describe the blue button pressers. White knight shows up more than once, as well, along side of "hero complex", "suicidal", "collective suicide", "suicidal empathy", "virtue signaling", and "gambling".
Then there are terms for the red side such as "safety", "rational", "dominant", and an appeal to game-theory.
Lastly, there is the accusatory angle, stating blue pressers brought it onto themselves, are psychotic, and "weaponized empathy".
For those arguing for blue button pushing, the overall register is complicity and harm. "Murder" occurs a lot, "genocide", "mass murder", and "kill". All accusatory terms.
Then we have "empathy", "mutual aid", "collective consciousness", "trust and cooperation". And end up with blues calling reds "sociopaths", "ultra-capitalists", "selfish", "violent", and "cynical".
Blues repeatedly invoke the vision of a world with no empathic people left and that red pressers should be "vilified and excommunicated".
There's also a strong hint of class and politics undertone in the red language that doesn't show up as much on the blue side. Religion, rural vs cosmopolitan, etc.
To me, the only heroic action possible is to be a red presser intellectually but empathy pulls them to risk it all for the blue pressers. Everyone else is just entrenched in finger pointing and identity politics.
Red pressers may be the majority. Are there enough of the heroic types of red pressers to save the blue? Who knows. But red pressers need to be keenly aware it is realistically impossible to get 100% of everyone to press the red button, so blue pressers will die without any aid.
Which would you press knowing that?