Apparently the following question has gone viral: Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press? What say you, WF?
Lawn chair. Yuengling. Popcorn. And now we await the results... I no longer have a dog in that fight (the survival of our species) as it has exhausted me to the point that I simply can't be arsed to so much as press a button, much less spare enough time and cogitation to choose a button for pressing. Y'all have fun with that; I'll be over here enjoying my treasured status as a spectator to your self-imposed and well deserved fate.
The problem is, not everyone will select red. And even if we are to assume 99 percent of people pick red, having 1 percent of the world's population die would be devastating, emotionally and morally.
One pill makes you larger, And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you, Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice. When she's ten feet tall.
Because the Nash equilibrium is everyone picks red, and I'd like to survive. And if everyone does pick red, they will too.
This is assuming that basically they put me in front of the buttons now and force an quasi instant reaction. If people can communicate, organize, negiotate before finally making their private choice, it might be a different beast.
But real life doesn't always operate by the Nash equilibrium. It's a cinch that at least some people will pick blue. I'd be hoping that at least 50.1 percent of people would. If they don't, there's a part of me that would be prepared to die rather than having to live with the knowledge of my level of complicity in the deaths of hundreds, thousands, millions, possibly billions. There's a part of me that would not live in a world where most if not all of the people who were willing to lean toward altruism in this respect were killed off. Would you be OK with the fact that not just some (likely large) number of people overall but also some number of your friends and family would be culled by having voted blue?
Awful? No. But I don't think it's an intelligence thing one way or another. Like people have said, choosing red ensures your survival and you can hope/expect that most people would also pick red and thus most would survive. It's perfectly defensible IMO from a moral standpoint to pick either. In the case of picking red, you would just have to hope that most people think as you do and also pick red, and accept that whatever percentage doesn't made their choice and live with the consequences. But the same goes for you as well. The notion of, say, a billion people gone because they picked blue might not bother people. It would be tough for me to live with that.
Aside from no "teh baba" option, there needs to be a choice like "Don't give a shit, just nuke the monkey-boys out of their misery already."
I pressed the Pat Buchanan button because the button layout was confusing. Precisely why I picked blue. If everyone picks red, everyone survives, no net change. If 50+% pick blue, everyone survives, no net change. If 50+% pick red, only those who pick red survive, population changes. As an individual. Picking blue means either nothing changes, or death. Picking read means no change, or a bunch of other people die. Pressing red guarantees survival. While there may be other motivations for picking red, all the people I consider shitty will pick red. Opportunists, cowards, the selfish... they're all pressing red. A significant amount of people will choose blue, because humans gonna human. All the shitty people press red, whereas the blue people, at worst, I feel indifferent about. I press red, either nothing changes, or the percentage of shitty people goes up. Fuck that, there's too many shitty people already. Just put me out of my misery.
It saddens me that a lot of people will not get this. It also makes me wonder how much the country and the world would be different if there was a non-confusing layout on the Palm Beach County ballot and Gore/Lieberman got the additional votes to win Florida because of that.
But it would take 100% of the people pressing red (an extremely unlikely scenario) for everyone to survive, and only 50% of the people pressing blue for everyone to survive. That is the same desirable outcome, and a much more feasable scenario for achieving it. And though choosing red guarantees your own personal survival, it also pretty much guarantees that it will be as part of a population that, overall, is more selfish and uncaring about the death of many others. Living in a world even worse than it is now is not desirable, IMO. Edited to add: I'm not saying that all those who choose red are selfish and uncaring about the death of many other people. I'm just saying that the percentage of such people among those who choose red will be higher (probably significantly so) than among those who choose blue.
it's not logic and it's not a game. it's simple. are you a selfish asshole or not. that's the question.
But you live. That’s better than dying. And if it turns out it’s not, well there are still all the ordinary ways to die. The closest real-world analogy is when an annexed territory holds a “plebiscite” to confirm the annexation, or “elections” in Assad’s Syria or North Korea. I’m not prepared to condemn them all for pushing red. You do what TPTB want to stay alive and then live to fight another day.
yeah… the violence is in the system in (or whoever it was that managed to set up this cynical experiment and force everyone to participate) — not the people pushing the red button
