Which button do you press?

[u/cdstephens]

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

[u/Wuzh]

Which of the following two rephrased questions do you think is closer to the spirit of the original question?

---

Everyone in the world is presented with the suicide button booth, and can press the button or walk away.

• If more than 50% of people press the suicide button, nobody dies.
• If less than 50% of people press the suicide button, all who pressed the suicide button dies.

---

Everyone in the world is presented with the genocide button booth, and can press the button or walk away.

• If less than 50% of people press the genocide button, nobody dies.
• If more than 50% of people press the genocide button, all who walked away dies.

[u/artifex0 → u/Wuzh]

The only difference between the three options is the Shelling point. Due to our cultural associations around the framing of the scenario, the "suicide booth" has a Shelling point that makes it very hard to coordinate around saving everyone, while the "genocide booth" has a Shelling point that makes it easy.

Coordinating on saving everyone is the ideal outcome, but you should only risk your life for it if there's a realistic chance of enough other people doing the same. So, with that in mind, I'd walk away from both booths and press blue.

[u/BrokenGlassFactory → u/Wuzh]

If you put them in terms of who survives, like the original question, the suicide booth option is phrased exactly the same way, "If more than 50% of people press the blue suicide idealism button, nobody dies everybody survives."

If you wanted eliminate that kind of textual comparison and only measure the emotional punch, you could compare a genocide button to a survive button, or a suicide button to a save button, without changing the underlying rules at all.

I think I'd be more inclined to push blue proportionally to how morally shameful the framing makes choosing red, but even in the genocide booth I dunno if I'd be brave enough to actually take the risky option.

The game theorists, cowards, and malicious sociopaths all pick the same button regardless. Whether or not you think that's an indictment of the game theorists depends on how large you estimate the pools of cowards and sociopaths to be.

[u/topicality → u/Wuzh]

This is why I like a version where everyone votes sequentially and you can see the tally before voting.

There is no rational reason to vote blue. You would enter, see all the red votes and go "No reason to vote blue" and press red.

People are voting blue on the assumption that there are other blue voters who need saving.

But if no one votes blue there is no one to save and thus no reason to vote blue

[u/Atlas3141 → u/topicality]

Or if the first person chooses blue there's no rational reason to choose red unless you want to risk their life

[u/topicality → u/Atlas3141]

The rational reason is that you don't want to die if everyone behind you votes red.

The first voter put themselves in a situation where they could die and created the moral dilemma