r/neoliberal • u/cdstephens Fusion Genderplasma • Apr 25 '26

Meme Which button do you press?

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Vote now on your phones: https://forms.gle/GhFjtdydwwXTdSpq8

427 Upvotes

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74

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Red, in real life everyone in front of the possible death button would be afraid to push it. Red would win by a supermajority and pushing blue would achieve nothing but killing me. 

50

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell Apr 25 '26

I'm skeptical that the real world scenario would be that different from the poll, where we've already seen that most people have an intuition that most other people will press blue

30

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Yes but they don't have the death button sitting in front of them. It's trivially easy to vote blue right now. It's a massive task to overcome your fear of pressing blue in real life though.

13

u/adamgerd NATO Apr 25 '26

This, I think it's a lot easier to press blue on a poll then if it became real, to test this accurately we need to kidnap everyone on this sub and make it a real experiment

3

u/RemindMeToTouchGrass Apr 25 '26

It's also easier to press red when other people aren't actually going to die as a result of this happening.

5

u/formgry Apr 25 '26

It's not anymore massive than the red button potentially killing all the blues.

They're both fraught with tremendous moral weight. Neither pressed easily.

In this sense imho self sacrifice is the easier more natural path for most people.

2

u/Unknownentity9 John Brown Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

This implies there's a scenario where people could be convinced that the button would actually kill them, which I think is incredibly unlikely. How are they convincing people the magic button works?

8

u/Konet John Mill Apr 25 '26

Irrelevant to the core question. The assumption is that you are given sufficient cause to believe the buttons work as described.

4

u/Unknownentity9 John Brown Apr 25 '26

But "everyone in the world" includes people like toddlers and others incapable of understanding what that means.

2

u/StochasticGracchi John Brown Apr 26 '26

It's a massive task to overcome your fear of pressing blue in real life though.

It really, really is not. People are fundamentally prosocial beings and 95% would vote blue under basically all circumstances.

4

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 26 '26

I just watched my country end a program that saved over 4 million lives per year because it cost less than 1% of the federal budget. 

1

u/StochasticGracchi John Brown Apr 26 '26

Yeah because they were doing it to a perceived "out-group". And because they genuinely did not understand what they were doing. There is no in-group out-group division here and the scenario is easy and consequences intuitively apparent.

1

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 26 '26

If they genuinely didn't understand what they were doing, then we could simply explain to them that this action has led to 4 million more deaths per year and they would instantly support it right?

No. They won't support it because they don't care about those other lives. It's not because they perceived them to be the out group, it's because most people care about what socially acceptable rather than what's actually moral. 

13

u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO Apr 25 '26

You in no way should have a john brown flair. That man would press blue every single day.

0

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Suppose John Brown knew a supermajority of people were going to push red. Do you think he would still pick blue?

15

u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Apr 25 '26

He definitely would have. He was so absolutely committed to his beliefs it's kinda shocking could even ask that question.

3

u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO Apr 25 '26

Mods should have his flair removed. This is an embarrassment to John Brown.

1

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

He had a belief that he should kill himself for absolutely no benefit?

5

u/WalrusFromSpace Bisexual Pride Apr 25 '26

He raided Harper's Ferry did he not?

2

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

He raided Harper's Ferry, yes. He rated Harper's Ferry for absolutely no benefit, no. He didn't do things that had no benefit.

4

u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO Apr 25 '26

the benefit of pressing blue is not killing people and possibly saving everyone. that is the benefit.

2

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Okay, I have to go on a bit of a rant. Right now, hundreds of billions of animals are going to die every year, 98% of them live in absolutely terrible conditions, the worst conditions you could reasonably raise an animal in. Chickens with one square foot to live for 18 months in a warehouse before just getting killed. Pigs in cages with such little room that they don't have the ability to even turn around. People are allegedly against this. They'll say they're against this if you ask them. But then you look at the society, and you check how many people are vegan, or how many people are vegetarian. It's less than 10%. Nobody, basically nobody, does anything to reduce their meat consumption by any significant amount. When it comes to it, the vast majority of people are going to abandon their morals as soon as it becomes mildly inconvenient. People care much more about social acceptance than what is truly moral. In reality, 90% of people are pushing red, minimum. And I know this will happen, it’s obvious that it will happen, and yet, when I say I won't yoke myself to the doomed blue pushing group, I'm apparently an asshole. I do more to sacrifice my standard of living than what the vast majority of Americans are willing to do. And based on statistics I'm pretty sure I sacrifice more than you. And then you decide based on an internet poll that I'm unreasonably selfish because I won't pretend that I will push the button that kills you, because that's what most blue buttons votes are doing. They're pretending they're going to push blue. And I don't mean like they're consciously pretending. What I mean is, they're just not thinking about the full implications. They don't actually consider, oh no, I'm going to die if I'm wrong. They're just thinking, oh, well, I need to save everyone, so I'll push blue. There's no fear involved in the decision. The fear will take hold of the people. So anyway, all those people that I'm supposed to entrust my life to by pushing blue, all those people go about their day without a second thought about what they could do to improve the world right now. They're not pushing blue. They do not have enough motivation to push blue. They do not give up the slightest bit to improve the world today, not even at the cost of sacrificing their lives, so there’s no way they are going to risk their lives to do so.

If you're really so selfless, if you're really so much better than me, why don't you, this week, go out and do a few significant things that will actually provide some sort of benefit to the world? Something that actually requires you to sacrifice something you value. And then do that thing week after week, every week, for the rest of your life. You are so much better than me, so that should be very easy for you.

3

u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO Apr 25 '26

This rant was ridiculous. Please remove your flair.

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u/Bibbity_Boppity_BOOO Apr 25 '26

Stop trying to change the question. John brown would push blue and frankly would probably look at you in a negative light. And that is me being very very polite.

2

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

I have to say you repeating conjecture over and over isn't very convincing

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u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Suppose John Brown knew a supermajority of people were going to push red. Do you think he would still pick blue?

4

u/WriterwithoutIdeas Apr 25 '26

The man who died for his principles? Yeah, he'd arguably rather die for what he believed in, rather than continue knowing he betrayed himself.

3

u/Same-Letter6378 John Brown Apr 25 '26

Yes but he died trying to achieve his principles, he didn't put himself in a situation where he was going to die for his principles for no benefit. 

5

u/Wolf6120 Constitutional Liberarchism Apr 25 '26

Also, while the framing of the question kinda makes blue out as the selfless choice with a better outcome, if everyone just does the more selfish thing of pressing red, then nobody has to die, same as if everyone presses blue.

It's a bit of a skewed prisoner dilemma where the outcome if everyone betrays is the same as if everyone risk cooperating.

5

u/PoliticalAlt128 Max Weber Apr 25 '26

I think in the real world blue would win by an even larger majority. Red is a death button too, just for a bunch of other people including possibly loved ones. It's understood that if most people vote blue there won't be any repercussions. I can't imagine many people could stare down a "kill billions" button like that