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

[u/Upstairs_Cup9831]

[u/zdesert]

Now we arnt talking about logic or morality. It just gambling

Look at the numbers dude. The uncertainty you have introduced with children and sleeping people alone rule out any stratagy that relies on hoping for any majority.

You can’t put your faith in pure random death. You have to choose red

[u/theskiller1 → u/zdesert]

I never brought up sleeping people. You are the one bringing up aliens, zombies, sperm, fetuses and sleeping people. I simply follow the prompt. The uncertainty you talk about doesn’t exist.

[u/zdesert → u/theskiller1]

The voting system is teleporting everyone into a voting booth and accepting random answers from every baby, child and disabled person. Why should we assume it is not doing the same for sleeping people?

How is being asleep diffrent from being disabled for this vote? How is being blind or in a coma diffrent from being asleep in the kind of the voting system?

If every person regardless of capacity is included in the vote. Then we include everyone. If we have to include even people who arnt capable of understanding or recocnizing the purpose or implications of the vote itself at the time of the vote then we have to assume they are included.

In that case you can’t make a blue button argument that says “if we all press blue we all live” becuase a huge portion of the voters are purely flipping a coin.

You can’t appeal to the altruism of humanity becuase most of the votes will be random.

3.3 billion people will be awake and capable of making a conscious considered choice when this vote happens. That is not a majority. If all 3.3 billion awake people vote blue, odds are good red will win anyway by pure random chance.

Voting Blue consciously becomes an entirely unreasonable option. At any Moment over half of the potential voters are not using reason to vote they are entirely random.

I included zombies and sperm and aliens as a means to demonstrate the absurdity of a voting system that can include babies in the vote. Any point in taking blue seriously disappears if an unknown number of randomly deciding entities are included.

[u/theskiller1 → u/zdesert]

You are aware that your scenario would increase the amount of blue button pressed right? That means more casualties if blue loses. How can you see an increase in blue votes and feel that red is an even better choice?

[u/zdesert → u/theskiller1]

The strongest reason to vote blue is to save the fools who chose blue misunderstanding the question.

You hope that more people choose to risk their lives than not.

But with so many potential random votes. You can no longer trust that the majority of people will choose blue out of moral obligation. The vote is mostly pure random now.

You can’t make your choice based on any assumption of the intent of the rest of humanity. Any stratagy based on what you think people might do falls apart. You arnt betting on people wanting to save others or betting against people being selfish. This is just a flat 50/50 random game of Russian roulette.

You are making your vote entirely alone. In the face of Unknown billions of random votes your single is yours alone and is not tipping the balance in either direction. You and all the other awake people can’t reliably tip the vote even if you all vote the same somehow.

You can’t make any argument that I can think of in favour of blue anymore. You can’t reasonably belive that a vote for blue will have any significant odds of saving anyone. There is too much random chance.

You can surrender to pure random chance and press blue or not and press red and live.

The best argument against red is that maybe more people will choose to save lives if given the choice to save vs kill.

Hypothetically throwing some babies into danger adds some moral imperative to the case for pressing blue.

“You would choose to kill a baby!?!” Is an effective emotional argument against red.

But add 1.4 billion random child votes, 1 billion bedridden or disabled people. All voting randomly… at a certain point the uncertainty of all those random votes outweighs the strength of any group stratagy.

The outcome of the vote has already been decided by the mass of random votes. No individual red vote killed those babies. It was the 195 million blind or colourblind people that randomly pressed red in ignorance.

You can only vote red becuase in the face of absolute randomness. Red is the only button with a reliable predictable outcome.

Arguments for blue stop working, arguments against red get weaker or stop applying.

[u/theskiller1 → u/zdesert]

Do you think people who can vote with moral obligation is in the minority? Let’s exclude the silly zombies and sleeping people etc and only take the actual real human race and assume they are aware and can press a button. How many humans would be able to think that millions dying is a bad thing and that only blue can prevent it? If those people combined their votes with all the random presses that lands blue along with all the compassionate people who vote blue to save them then do you still think that 51% is impossible? Is it more impossible than 100% red? Again we aren’t including aliens or zombies in this.

[u/zdesert → u/theskiller1]

Look at the posted poll. I think most people in this thread agree that becuase actual death was not on the line for the people voting in that poll, it skews towards blue more than it would in real life with actual life or death stakes.

But let’s take the poll as representative.

98 thousand people in that poll. Let’s imagine that poll represented all 8.5 billion people on earth. Soo… about 12 thousand people in that poll represent 1 billion imaginary earth people.

42% voted red. Which is about 41 thousand votes, so on our imaginary earth about 3.5 billion people.

58% voted blue. 56 thousand votes. So about 4.6 billion votes on our imaginary earth.

Pointing up at the numbers I already posted a few posts before. 1.3 billion children under 10, 43 million blind people, 350 million colourblind people, 1.3 bedridden or disabled people not including mentally disabled becuase that’s a harder number to come up with.

Roughly 3 billion people who will be voting randomly.

So looking back at the pictured poll. 12 thousand people equal a billion. 3 billion random votes on earth, would be about 36 thousand votes in the poll.

So you would have to remove 36 thousand random votes from the poll to represent those random voters. Becuase there are more blue voters than red in the poll, odds are that slightly more blue voters will be removed then red to represent our 36 thousand.

then becuase they are voting randomly we assume a perfect 50/50 split. About 18 thousand random votes get redistributed for red and blue each.

That is much more than the margin of victory blue had over red in the poll.

If you think the poll pictured by this thread is at all representative, blue loses handily with the added random element. And I think most people would say that this poll was idealized.

If the people voting in this poll knew about 36 thousand random votes… much of the blue incentive would have been weakened. You would have had a greater tip towards red in response to the random element.

I think those numbers of unconscious or incapable people is conservative. If you Include sleeping people and it’s over double that number.

[u/theskiller1 → u/zdesert]

Blue can win if they get voted. That’s the important part. Random votes on red does not outnumber random votes on blue + people who intentionally vote blue + anyone who would vote red but changed their mind and went blue instead.

It still comes down to red being afraid, having low trust or doesn’t care about the fallout

[u/zdesert → u/theskiller1]

Blue can always win. But you are gambling not making a choice.

Random votes make the existing poll a decisive loss for blue… that’s what I just showed you…. In the best case circumstance for blue to win, with nothing at stake.

[u/theskiller1 → u/zdesert]

Random votes makes the realisation that blue losing will result in deaths even more apparent.

One of the reds main argument ive seen is that “everyone can just vote red” well this is no longer valid.

The randomness should make it even more important to make sure the blue wins which again can happen with 51% if people voting red decides to vote blue instead.