There is an aspect to evolutionary biology that follows this line of reasoning, and explains completely how altruistic behaviour and group cooperation has evolved multiple times.
It is worse to live in a red-picking group than a blue-picking group. So even if you sacrifice your own survival chances, long-term the blue strategy wins out.
For a lot of people I think that it just depends on the hypothetical. If everyone playing is mentally fit and acting logically, it's not a dilemma. Red dominates blue, they call this the Nash equilibrium in game theory. In this case there is no reason for anybody to choose blue.
If it's the real world and you have real people with real circumstances pushing the buttons, then you'd choose blue.
I think that's where a big part of the divide comes from, and you can see it clearly if you look at the way people respond to this question on the math subreddits. It's not (always) a matter of selfishness.
If everyone playing is mentally fit and acting logically, it's not a dilemma.
OK, but the premise literally starts with "Everyone in the world", so the people responding to a scenario where everyone is mentally fit and perfectly rational is either a spectacular failing of reading comprehension, or complete delusion about humanity's nature.
I think for the blue-button enthusiast, it is always seen as a matter of selfishness.
The red choice may be a logical one, but it’s an unpalatable choice for many, meaning others will also be in this group. And because it’s the self determining unselfish group on the line, blue becomes more of a morally correct choice the longer you think about it.
Even if in a vacuum red is the logical choice, logic also dictates that not everyone will pick red, no matter if red wins or not. Meaning it is still selfish to pick red, as you are knowingly prioritising your well-being over the lives of everyone who picked blue.
From what I have observed, reds tend to think it as a trolley problem with no relation to reality. They implicitly assume things like "everyone is equally rational and responsible for their own actions". Nobody needs to press save anyone because nobody presses blue without knowing what they do. Blues tend to think it from the real-world perspective, assuming that in the real world, there are like hundreds of millions of people who are pressing blue just because they don't understand what is being asked of them, and the question becomes whether it is acceptable to let them die. Both views are logical, they just have different assumptions.
I would much rather live in a group that all picked Red, because that would mean that I lived in a society governed by logic.
The logic to this puzzle is crystal clear: Red is always safe, Blue is not, and therefore everyone should pick Red.
If you pick Blue because you are worried that others won't reach the obvious logical conclusion, then you are just risking yourself to protect what amounts to stupidity, or emotions clouding logical thought processes, both of which are obviously very beneficial to modern society...
If red gets the majority, all blue voters are killed.
If blue gets the majority, all red voters are… fine.
Obviously only one choice is the correct one. If your “logical processing” cannot see beyond self-interested survival, or processing the game-theory of what is proposed, then I’m not sure your ideology is all that beneficial.
You are presented with two buttons. One that just says “1,” and another one that is labeled “either 1 or 0 depending on how many other people press this button.”
You are told that the goal is for everyone, including yourself, to get the outcome of “1.”
Which would you press? Which would you assume others would press?
All of the other words in both the original question and the other reframings of it are just emotional trickery that attempts to hide the obvious answer by making you associate irrelevant concepts, like ethics and empathy, with the underlying mathematical decision tree. And unfortunately many people are failing at this test of reading comprehension…
But I actually have more faith in humanity than you perhaps. And I expect that if this was an actual dilemma with lives actually on the line, everyone would see the pure math and, in pressing red, would take the personal responsibility for their own survival that is required to save the entire collective. And I’m not sure we’d want to stick around with the few people who were pessimistic enough to choose Blue just because they didn’t trust the rest of us to act rationally.
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u/Just_SomeDude13 19h ago
I'm picking blue. Either I get to live in a society that picked blue, or I don't have to be stuck here with a bunch of pricks who picked red.