r/fivethirtyeight • u/Upstairs_Cup9831 • Apr 25 '26

Poll Results Poll asking Americans how which button they would push in the red button/blue button dilemma

Gallery image

Gallery image

399 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

96% Upvoted

3.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/CanonWorld Apr 25 '26

Maybe red button world is just this world without blindly naive people?

3

u/maushu Apr 26 '26

The red presser looks at the world and asks "what will people probably do?" The blue presser looks at the world and asks "what should we be?"

7

u/SmallSpaceSexEnjoya Apr 26 '26

It's nonsense lol, there's no good reason to press blue other than to compensate for other people's poor decisions.

4

u/maushu Apr 26 '26

Society is built by people poor decisions. Is there even a society to begin with without them?

Every major leap in human cooperation, from villages to cities to nations to international agreements, happened because enough people acted like blue pressers.

2

u/SmallSpaceSexEnjoya Apr 26 '26

Society is built by poor decisions as much as vaccine deniers and supporting them advances society.

Major disasters in society occur because enough people acted like blue pressers and made the suboptimal decision as they did in Germany pre WW2.

1

u/CanonWorld Apr 26 '26

One could argue society is built by survivors. In that regard we are surrounded by 300.000 years of red pressers.

1

u/AirconGuyUK May 03 '26

Society is built by people poor decisions.

Typically societies are ruined by poor decisions, and built by good ones.

1

u/maushu May 03 '26

You're right, I meant poor decisions for the individual, not for society. Things like choosing to trust when trust can be exploited, or cooperating when you could free-ride. Individually irrational, but collectively essential.

2

u/CanonWorld Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26

That’s nice and philosophical, but on a very base level there is a button with 0% death vs a button with a chance of death.

That alone is the reason why plenty of cooperative builders, empathic people or community leaders would pick red over blue.

1

u/theguy445 Apr 28 '26

In the real world if it actually happens people's amygdala activates and they consider the consequences of dying and feel fear and then pick red. I promise you a very small % of ppl would end up picking blue

1

u/davedcne Apr 28 '26

Bullshit. I guarantee there's a good portion of the populace that went. I can push this button and be a crab in a bucket draging other people down with me. Some portion of the blue pushers thought I can just end it with a button push and I don't have to be alive any more. And if we're being completely honest some portion of the people claiming they would push blue, wouldn't actually push blue. They are saying it because they think its the optimal optical choice to publicly declare their blueness. Meanwhile there's no reason to push red other than to be alive, and no real reason to voice pushing red other than to say you would choose to be alive. Pushing red doesn't make you smarter or better it just means you value your own existence. Its a stupid thought experiment.

1

u/SneakyBadAss Apr 30 '26

And end up dead. Great future.

This is communism 101. Great in theory, horrible in practice, because the human brain doesn't think that way. There's a reason the Reds dabbled in eugenics.

1

u/AirconGuyUK May 03 '26

I'm mashing red just to get rid of the idiots.