15 Comments

  1. Same-Letter6378 on

    Red, in real life everyone in front of the possible death button would be afraid to push it. Red would win by a supermajority and pushing blue would achieve nothing but killing me. 

  2. WifeGuy-Menelaus on

    This feels like a quasi-rapture where all the people willing to put themselves in harms way for the sake of others are taken away and only the most self-interested remain

  3. I’ve seen this problem framed another way that I think would get most people to push red.

    Specifically, only one member of a family gets to push the button, but the entire family bears the consequences. This means that you’re not just taking your own life into your own hands by pushing the blue button, you’re taking the life of your wife, children, parents, etc.

    It’s interesting to see the difference between how people react to the two buttons, because it speaks to fact that sympathy is always going to be preferably allocated to people closer to you.

    The most childish people are the people screaming genocide at a hypothetical thought experiment. Those people are just performative, and should not be taken seriously.

  4. There are two Nash Equilibrium in the game. One is stable, whereas the other is not.

  5. Blue, I don’t want to live in a world where I killed people. Though being an American means my tax dollars kill innocent people nearly every day so….. yeah.

  6. I understand from a game theory standpoint pushing red is the obvious choice. But stepping back and having a big picture moment we will all die eventually anyway and pushing the red button makes you a direct culprit in the deaths of millions, if not billions.

    What’s left of your life will be a torture mentally, unless you’re a psychopath. Not to mention such a catastrophic cost of life would send the world into chaos .And if there is an afterlife or if we have souls or anything like that you’re dooming yourself for all eternity. All that to buy yourself maybe a few decades of miserable existence? Pass.

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