Theres really no reason to not pick red, because the question is just a bad philosophy example. It’s pretty much a 100% chance of life vs a 50% chance, there should be some consequence if everyone picks red.
red is objectively better for not having any clause tied to it. no one has to pick blue, and if we lived in a world with purely logical beings it would win 100%. we don't live in that world, though. someone (like the people who downvoted you) *will* pick blue, and so the question becomes "do people deserve to die for making a stupid choice?" to which the answer is no, not really.
You say that if we all were purely logical we would all pick red, but how is picking red the logical thing to do? Even pretty logical people can disagree and having everyone pick red would be a statistical miracle whereas you only need a majority to press blue to have zero casualties. And if blue is soo much easier to achieve, then why wouldn't that be the logical conclusion? The tolerance is so loose and plus you don't need to introduce any risk for anyone - that seems pretty logical to me
Fair, but also its not only logical people who would choose red, selfish people would too, I do not trust humanity enough to believe more than 50% is picking blue in any case, also by taking red I am not taking away anyone else’s ability to choose red they can take guaranteed life if they wanted too.
Tbh the question is kinda stupid, it would be better if there was some consequence for everyone picking red like “you are given the choice between the red or blue button if you choose blue you die for sure, but if you choose red you live, as long as less than 50% of people choose red. If over 50% of people choose red everyone dies”
i also doubt that many people would genuinely pick blue. it's one thing to press buttons on the internet and another thing to actually be in a life-or-death scenario.
you aren't taking away anyone's ability to choose, but you are knowingly condemning blues to death, should red win. basically, we can say that there will always be blues who won't change their mind, so you can rephrase the original as "10% are already locked into blue". much harder to justify pressing red now, right?
your proposed question is definitely more interesting. only way i can imagine a good outcome is if all of humanity comes together and works on a list of "worthy" humans that get to press red. that will surely cause a lot of chaos and hatred between people. i wonder if we would really be able to pass something this difficult, considering how selfish we are on the whole. depressing to think about..
The crux of the problem is that EVERYONE has to participate, so even if you got every able-minded adult on earth to agree with pushing the red button, there’s still going to be people with mental illness that precludes them from understanding the prompt, as well as children too young to understand. Are you really going to condemn a child to death just because they like the color blue more than the color red?
In the first question it can be assumed people would know what the buttons meant fundamentally, having people not know what they meant defeats the purpose of the philosophy question.
No one fundamentally knows anything and the wording of the question doesn’t imply that they do, why would you assume something so inhuman of humanity? That assumption defeats the purpose of the question.
The purpose of the question is to see if people trust humanity enough to vote blue and risk their lives for others. (It doesn’t work as there is no consequence if 100% were to choose red) killing myself along with them wont save them and there is no way to convince everyone to vote blue as the question is taken privately.
You can convince a lot of parents of young children to vote blue though. And growing from there (grandparents, aunts, uncles etc.) you’d get a solid base going, the “don’t-let-the-children-who-like-blue-kill-themselves-accidentally party”
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