have you seen the "you're evil unless you press the blue button" discourse on reddit. (two buttons, red and blue, everyone who presses the blue button dies unless more than 50% of people pressed it) I'm guessing you'd be a red button presser like myself but I'm curious if you have opinions on why reddit is pushing this really hard right now. so many subreddits are pushing "you're evil if you press red" and even "liberal" boards are calling red button pressers "retarded" for not risking themselves to save the blue button pressers. it feels like an op or an astroturf to me but not sure why.
Yes I have
It's an ethical optical illusion. The correct choice is red. Everyone would press red and has pressed red. But you know thst "risk yourself to save others" is the kind of answer you are supposed to give as a good and moral person, so people will bend over backwards and invent new elements to make it into the right answer. The social desirability bias will twist their brains up so that picking blue is a heroic moral stand expressing their faith in humanity. They'll say that since losing even 1% of the world would be so disruptive, we have an obligation to press blue to prevent it.
They say everyone has an obligation to press blue in order to save everyone, because some people will press blue recklessly. But they don't believe that logic holds. Nobody actually believes in endangering half of society in order to save the most reckless people in it. If they did, all of them would be as reckless as the most reckless people in society, because they'd be following them around everywhere! They'd hear the national weather service announce a tornado warning that said to stay inside, and would immediately drive outside to try and rescue the people who were too reckless to stay inside.
IIRC, the thought experiment was designed specifically so that the proper-sounding pro-social answer was the incorrect one, in order to illustrate exactly what it illustrated.
It's even more obvious if you reverse the order of presentation. Because described from Red first, it's 'you push this button, you live. You push this other button and you will die, UNLESS over half the population also decides to push this button. Then nobody dies.'
By putting the blue button first, it makes it sound like the default and that choosing red is the choice of death. But blue is the choice of death, in all situations.
I learned about this problem from this Dev video:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HDUak4vAczk which also includes two details that you didn’t consider. 1: Polls, including a poll where the penalty was actually enforced (as a server ban not as literal death) reliably found that about 60% of people choose blue so voting red is effectively risking those people’s lives when blue was probably going to win anyways, and 2: There will always be some people who choose blue, children who didn’t understand the rules and chose a button at random, people who slipped and pressed the wrong button, or who wanted to save everyone and don’t know game theiry or who are blind or whatever. Those people will
From a game theory perspective there is no reason not to choose red. From an ethics perspective it’s much more complicated.
see, you have to add elements to it to turn it into a heroic moral stand. the question specifies that it is only presented to people who understand it. but people have to add in "what about all the people who don't understand it?" so you can include children and the blind.
there is absolutely nothing that is ethically complicated about not endangering yourself to save the most reckless people in the world. period. no ambiguity. if the most reckless people in the world pushed the Commit Suicide Button the proper response is "wow, they really should not have done that" the way you react to literally every other instance of suicidal recklessness.
in fact, you can remove the red button and literally nothing changes! the red button does nothing in the scenario. so the scenario actually is "a man walks up to you and, after determining you can understand the offer, presents a blue button that, if pushed, will kill you unless more than 50% of people total pushed the button. you can also just, like, leave." this scenario is identical in every way and yet the answer is even more screamingly obvious.
this is not an ethical or moral question. this is a question of if you can see the obvious when social desirability demands you do otherwise.
I feel you missed the point. If enough people are given the buttons then some of them will choose blue, that may be stupid but I don’t think it’s deserving to die levels of stupid. I do think the situation changes slightly if you remove the red button and just make it “press blue or walk away” although it’s subtle and more psychological than real. The addition of the red button makes it feel more like a choice between two equal options which I do think psychologically influences people in this situation. Also the version I saw wasn’t “only people who understand it get the question” but maybe that was the one you saw.
That’s besides the real point which is that there are plenty of people I know who I do think are likely to choose blue. I don’t want them to die and studies on this question indicates that blue has decent odds of winning so therefore I should choose blue.
If you ask me the question isn’t really a matter of game theory although it can be framed that way, it’s actually individualism vs collectivism.
I think choosing the option that will explicitly kill you when explicitly told this option will kill you instead of not doing that is, in fact, a central example of "deserve to die level of stupid." Reckless people do things that result in their own deaths that are far less objectively stupid, like riding motorcycles without helmets.
Their recklessness does not create in any other person the obligation to endanger themselves to save them from that recklessness. Reckless behavior results in death all the time and you are capable of seeing that. When presented as a hypothetical, the social desirability bias can't let you see that, and you have to make it a historic moral stand instead.
There is a degree to which pressing the blue button is a mistake, and you're actually saving people from mistakes rather than recklessness. The person who pressed blue got confused and thought it was the right choice.
The thing that makes it worse is that they really believe they're being self-sacrificing. You aren't running into a tornado to save people who recklessly stayed outside, you're running into a tornado to save people who ran into a tornado to save people. The only way to save everyone is for everyone to run into the tornado!
Compare OSHA. If everyone just does what's best for themselves, then a tiny fraction will die and the rest will live. If everyone follows the plan, then nobody will die.
All that being said, I would press the red button. I would not, in fact, run into a tornado to save someone who ran into a tornado to save someone.
However, I would like to point out that the reason pushing blue is intuitive is because all of our ancestors who would have pushed red in a real situation died out a long time ago. Saving yourself is not selected for by evolution. Charging into the enemy, massacring them in the rout, and taking their women for yourself is what was selected for.
Genghis Khan is the ancestor of 0.5% of the population of the world because he would have pressed blue. Pressing blue isn't a moral decision, it's what you do when you see the people in the front line charging and decide to follow them into either life or death. Whichever side has more blue-pressers will enslave the losers and the descendants of the blue-pressers will inherit the Earth.
The blue button is the charge button. Charge into the tornado to support those who charged in before you. People resist red because it resembles cowardice, and people hate cowardice because it was selected against in the ancestral environment.
During WW1, women went around Britain handing out white feathers to men to shame them into enlisting. WW1 was a senseless waste of human life. The point of the blue button is to shame people into throwing away their lives by accusing them of cowardice.
I'm gonna have to argue the counter to this one in specific. Genghis Khan is not a 'blue button' person. Nor would any of his army be. Specifically because the button is NOT choosing to rush into danger. You can conflate the blue button with running into a tornado, but it is very SPECIFICALLY one of 'sitting safe in a room and picking a button'.
The risk is existential. The burning building is theoretical. And a significant portion of the people who state they would pick blue? Do so specifically because they say they don't want to have blood on their hands.
You cannot argue the red button is the position of moral cowardice when the blue button is the one of intentional inaction.
They're not the men dying on the battlefield, they're the women SAFE AT HOME, handing out the white feather to demand others die to save them.
I think it's a psyop to guilt people into going along with blatantly bad decisions, which is manipulative behavior used by abusers and junkies. "I'm going to do this objectively bad thing that I shouldn't do but now you all have to go along with it".
It's a complication of the 'Noble Savior' archetype. They feel obligated to do the 'good and moral' choice even when it's self-destructive, and then when the choice IS self destructive, they demand everyone else save them from that position.
The problem being that if they were really the kind of people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole?
They wouldn't demand that others follow them into it to save their lives.
For all you fiction brains out there Shirou Emiya would press the blue button in an attempt to save the people who don't understand the prompt and think it was a good decision
