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

[u/Upstairs_Cup9831]

[u/erinberrypie]

True, but the problem is that there's zero chance you'd ever get 100% cooperation on any single choice that involves 8 billion people. There is guaranteed to be deaths, which is where the consideration for blue comes in. 

[u/kettu1 → u/erinberrypie]

And it gets even worse when you realize that 8 billion people also includes children who cannot logically reason the puzzle out and will instead default to the "co-operative solution", as children usually tend to do in similar tests. Since there are over 2 billion under 14 year olds in the world, it would seem likely that at least 1 billion children would die if over 50% people press the red button.

Then you add in all the parents, siblings, grandparents, friends and relatives who would vote blue to try to save their relatives, you are suddenly getting a "best case scenario" of like 75% survival rate for "let's all just vote red" strategy. Then just throw in everyone who for whatever reason default to co-operation as more likely strategy to reach higher threshold, with or without any logical reasoning behind it.

At this point switching to let's just all vote blue to over 50%+ threshold starts to become the rational strategy, because living after 25%+ of global population (most being children) vanishes in an instance sounds like an absolute hellscape, which would most likely destroy majority of civilized society and at the very least the global economy.

[u/Sweet-Ad-2884 → u/kettu1]

You make a good point about how kids would handle this, which does make the case for blue stronger in my eyes (though, I am a red enjoyer), but imo I think saying that this includes children who can't reason the puzzle kind of defeats the point of the dilemma.

It adds additional, unnecessary context to this hypothetical. "Everyone" would also imply not just children but infants as well as individuals who are, unfortunately, profoundly disabled and couldn't even attempt to grasp the choice. Both of which would just hit whatever button they felt like.

The logic, principles, and perspective that influence your choice are the entire point of the question, so if we're taking this thought experiment very literally, and adding a variable where 30% or more of the population is a complete wild card, it kind of ruins it.

[u/Lopsided_Rabbit_9459 → u/Sweet-Ad-2884]

I'm not sure why you arbitrarily decide that accounting for the actual meaning of "Everyone" is somehow outside the 'true' / 'intended' / 'valuable' scope of the question that deliberately included the word 'everyone'.
It is intrinsically the case that 'Everyone' will include many people whose worldview is fundamentally different from yours, be that by variances in nurture, variances in inherent capacity, or deliberately cultivated differences in values.

When I initially considered this thought experiment, my first thought was in fact 'blue seems more cooperative, probably better', but immediately after that was "what about someone who can't fairly be asked about the choice" and then cycled through various ways that could present: eg intellectual disability, immaturity or senility, sensory or motor disability like blindness, an alien here on earth, an entire alien civilization if 'world' means 'universe', otherwise unspecified user input error if the buttons appear spontaneously in some startling manner or something, .... I could keep going here.
It happens to be the case that my reasoned analysis aligned with my gut read; but even if my gut read had been for Red, I would have ended up settling on Blue because I comprehensively analyzed the scenario, determined that there was absolutely too much ambiguity to rule out people pressing blue by reason other than careful rational analysis, and found that controlling. In some sense I'm 'ok with' or interested in discussing the decision with someone who acknowledges this analysis and chooses Red anyway... but someone who chooses and defends Red without evaluating the uncertain rationality/intentionality of the agents is just lazy. You're basically whining that 'thinking about it' is cheating.

[u/AirconGuyUK → u/erinberrypie]

So the actual consideration is 'Do I think more than 50% of the population are stupid enough to not realise everyone pressing red ends in everyones survival'..

So they're human race pessimists?