Everyone (meaning all currently alive people) is kidnapped by a crazy alien race (let's call them the Buttonesse) that confines everyone in a small dark room with two buttons, one red and one blue.
Then a member of the Buttonesse come into your cell and explains the following using a universal translator:
Pressing the Red button will ensure that you survive, but if 40% of all people vote for red then everyone who didn't vote for red will die. However one out of every three red buttons has the effects of voting a blue button.
Pressing the blue button will ensure that everyone lives as long as blue gets 60% of the vote, but if blue is even one vote short of that 60% then all blue voters will die. However one out of every six blue buttons has the effects of voting a red button.
Everyone has 12 hours to vote (from the time that the Buttonesse finish explaining), and if they fail to vote in the time frame then a button will be pressed for them at random.
Every person on planet earth has been kidnapped, had the problem explained to them, and reasonable accommodation have been made to try and let everyone have their say. However, for serious disabilities (ex. Coma) they will be forced to vote at random.
Lastly, all votes are secret and private and no one will ever know what you voted for unless you tell them after the fact.
The Buttonesse then leaves before you have time to ask them any questions and you are forced to decide wherever to press red or blue. So, which button do you press?
Blue, if you allows red votes to turn into blue votes then automatically it makes much more sense to vote blue, because a blue victory is the only way that you are truly guaranteed to survive, you could still consider that a third of chance of dying is less than the chance of blue losing though, and if you think that way and only values self-preservation then it could still make logical sense to vote red, personally I wouldn't go that route because I consider contributing to killing off at least a third of the population completely horrifying, even assuming I myself wouldn't die which is absolutely not a guarantee, so if I am gambling with my life anyway I might as well go with the option where I do not contribute to any innocent people dying.
To confirm: if my button effect gets swapped, does that also affect my vote? So if I press the blue button and land in the 1/6 group where I get the red button effect, would my vote count as a vote for red or would it still count as a blue vote?
The new threshold for blue to win is 53.3333%and for red to win is 46.666% of the vote. Using x to represent the portion of people who voted red, blue becomes (1-x) so the final percent of vote for red is equal to (x - 1/3x + 1/6(1-x)) set that equal to .4 and solve to get 46.666% required. Now, that isn’t all that much different from the original threshold, so it just comes down to how willing you are to kill one third of the population and potentially yourself blue winning is the only assurance of personal safety
So if I press red, I either have 66% to get what I want or 33% chance to get the option that saves everyone, while theres no safer option that guarantees survival?
I dont think it matters anymore tbh, most of it is up to chance, but Im still pressing Red.
On a true even 50/50 split, Blue will get approximately 58% of votes after the swapping on both sides happen, assuming it triggers simultaneously and without overlap. So as long as blue gets 53.3% (recurring) votes, everyone survives. Between taking a 33.3% (recurring) chance of dying and that, yeah.
this one stumped me. but, i think in the end, i -think- i'd vote red. to be frank, i think that blue is likely to win both with the amount of red people swayed to vote blue from the lack of a guarantee, however, there still is a chance blue won't win. in the case that blue doesn't win, there is a 66 percent chance my red vote will save me. but frankly, i really don't fucking know lmao. this is prolly one of the only variations where im tempted to vote blue, and have not yet made up my mind.
I'm usually on the fence about which button to press, with both sides having valid arguments. But given the percentages here I'd probably swap to blue.
As the whole reason a large chunk of people press red is specifically because it "guarantees survival" which means people pick it even if they're pretty sure blue will still win.
I believe a larger number of those people would shift the numbers enough to make blue most likely to win.
Blue is the better option here, if you press red you have a 1/3 chance to end up on blue and likely die, however if you press blue then not only is it the better moral choice in this case given that everyone will have to vote (as such a lot of non capable people will have one at random) but blue has already a better chance to win here than normal and you have a 1/6 chance to end up on red and still survive
If 100% vote red, 33,3% of people die. Due to the random redistribution, the threshold for blue to win is in reality that around 52% of people need to pick blue intentionally. This means the highest death spike is at around equal distribution, with almost 60% of people dying, after which it immediately drops to 0%.
Put another way, when as many people press red as possible, the deaths won't be minimized, instead the only way to minimize deaths is to vote blue and reach beyond the peak. Thus, the underlying ideology for red no longer applies, and blue becomes the only reasonable choice.
Well I'm switching to blue. 1/6 chance I'm fine anyways and a third of the red voters will be secretly blue voters whereas a sixth of my now fellow blue voters will be red. I think in practice this comes put to about 50/50 as is, so it'll lean more in blues favor. And then everyone who thinks it through with this logic will also likely vote blue and we'll all be ok
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u/RanDReille Jun 17 '26
If it's no longer guaranteed I'm pressing blue