Found on Bluesky:
@angus.bsky.social
Elder daughter just told me about the red button / blue button ethical dilemma that’s been going around, and | find it FASCINATING.
Short version: Everyone on earth has to press a button. If a majority presses the blue button, everyone lives. If a majority presses the red button, everyone who presses the biue button dies.
She told me about this, and my immediate response was “That’s not interesting at all. Obviously everyone just pushes the biue button.” And then she started explaining the red button folks’ arguments, and |realized that it’s a question about how you understand what it is to be a human in community.
Likewise, my first thought was to press the blue button. But then I thought that that would just give all the red button people what they wanted, and I’d end up dead while they could take all my stuff. But then I thought again, would I want to live in a world full of murderous bastards? And I was back to pushing the blue button.
You could cycle around and around this dilemma all day long. Entertaining, but I have better things to do.
This does have evolutionary implications. We don’t have buttons with global effects, but throughout our history we’ve had people meeting and having to choose between cooperating and expediently executing those who oppose us. I think in the long run, cooperation wins, but the problem with this thought experiment is that it compresses a billion incremental decisions into one final, immediate commitment, and that isn’t at all realistic.
Another take on the red pill versus blue pill metaphor. I guess the Matrix continues to influence culture. Another aspect of the unrealistic nature of the problem is the sharp dichotomy. Reality is seldom so extreme and sharply defined. Welcome to the land of gray.
It’s a terrible truth that reason alone drives a person to push the red button.
There is a zero cost and a non-zero potential benefit to pushing the red button, and there is a huge potential cost and zero potential benefit to pressing the blue one. Competing with that decision is that pressing red would make me feel like a shit human, while pressing blue would make me feel good about myself until my inevitable incineration.
We have evolved to cooperate. The problem is when we encounter outgroups.
In what possible sense is directly and purposefully contributing to the deaths of an untold but undoubtedly very large number of people “zero cost and a non-zero potential benefit”? Other people have no value? What the hell is wrong with you?
It would not make you feel like a shit human, it would make you be a shit human.
We should find a way to implement this – except that what actually happens is that it kills everybody who votes for other people to die.
It’s trivial.
Everyone presses the red button, and everyone lives.
The outcome of the game is the same, i.e. everyone lives, for p(defection) = [0, 0.5) and [1]. This doesn’t suggest any plausible biological scenarios to me. Can anyone think of an analogue? Having said that, I think it’s interesting as an exercise in examining people’s moral reasoning.
I had to think about this. It is about how the question is phrased. The same game could be stated “Push the red button to live and press the blue button to die. If more than 50% of people push blue button, everyone lives instead.” It is logically the same game.
I would push the button that activates the Eschaton. As it is basically an electric Time Lord I would thus delegate ethical issues to an entity better suited to deal with them.
Red is not “If more people press red, everyone who pushes blue dies”. That’s framing. The question isn’t even interesting, it’s meant to generate divisive conversation.
We finally have a moral quandary where the right choice is for everyone on earth to be selfish. It would finally be the best strategy. It’s objectivist bullshit. Fine. Red. I guess I’m finally not a second-hander.
Interesting choice of colors:
Red states, red hats, red button.
Blue states, ? hats, blue button.
Dunc@4–
trevorn was talking about the scenario within Game Theory, where costs and benefits are defined and the players are rational, self-interested, and fully aware of the rules of the game. Moral implications may follow, but they are not part of the game itself (which is one of several reasons Game Theory doesn’t always work in real-world situations, especially in economics).
chrislawson: @ #11: The fact that John Nash formalised his mental illness into a mathematically computable system does not change the fact that it’s insane. As soon as you start using game theoretic concepts to talk about human lives, you have committed what Granny Weatherwax defined as sin: treating people as things.
Basically: Blue button = followers of Jim Jones. Red button = everyone else.
I’d try to convince people not to follow the insane suicide pact.
I think you might frame this as an analogy of people’s reaction to the climate crisis. They can approach it purely from their personal benefit (press the red button, you know you’ll live, even if a lot of other people may die. This is like ignoring the crisis, because you want the best outcome for you, right now), or from the collective point of view (press the blue button, and everyone lives if enough of you are thinking the same way; do things to stop global warming, and it’s best for the world).
OK, on further thought, numerobis may have the better take. The problem would be that almost any decision can be got wrong by a small minority, even when people are given time to think about it, So no matter how well you argue that the entire world should press their red button, and then everyone would know both that they’re safe and so is everyone else, someone wouldn’t see it that way. And you might say “easier to persuade a bit over half the world to save everyone, than persuade every last person that they can act in their own interest, and so can everyone else”. But if you’re only somewhat successful in that argument, a lot of people could die.
I think there is interest in it.
I’m sorry Dunc @ #11, within the parameters of the GAME as presented doing anything other than pressing the red button would be insane.
It’s not a prisoners dilemma where the payoff if everyone cooperates is different to that if everyone betrays. In this game the optimal outcome is for everybody to press the same button, either red or blue. But if a mix of people choose red and blue buttons then the blue button has the potential to be suicide while the red button does not. So any logical person would dispassionately press red and a logical person who also had a strong moral conscience would hope that everyone else did the same.
I’m sorry, this is semi-off-topic, but all I can think about is the end of the Ren & Stimpy Space Madness episode with the “beautiful, SHINY button… the jolly, CANDY-LIKE button!”
Pretty much how I approached it. Though my tendency was to think of it in the added context of an imposed decision from powerful people who have to frame it as a false democratic choice, which made it become a question of solidarity with humanity against this vague oppressive force. I push blue because I’m not willing to throw blue under the bus to guarantee my own safety. After all, what’s stopping them from issuing another false problem like this where I’ll suffer later? First they came for the blues…