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?
Blue
Red
0voters
Please don’t look up how people have answered. This is a private vote, so try your best to assume you’re just spontaneously forced to make a choice with no explicit knowledge of how anyone else will vote.
So, if I push the red button, I’m definitely safe. If I push the blue button, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll die. Everyone knows this. Nobody has to die. What is the possible benefit of pushing blue.
I haven’t looked it up, but it seems extremely unlikely to me that more than 50% of people will push blue. Extremely. If I’m wrong, or if it’s anywhere close, I will hang my head in shame.
On the other hand, what someone says on a Twitter poll with nothing to lose is not likely to be the same as what they say when their life is on the line.
But still, when the time comes, I’ll push the blue button. Who would want to live in a world with only pragmatists and Republicans anyway.
If the whole world had to vote, I don’t think you can rely on everyone to figure it out. Some are going to push the blue, thinking enough other people will believe they have to save the world by coming together pushing the blue button. That was my first thought - either I save myself, or I try to save the world and hope 50% or more of the world were good people.
But then of course I figured out two things - people are selfish so it was a big risk to try to save everyone else too by piling up more than 50% on the blue button, and if everyone just skipped the gamble and pushed the red selfishly, if everyone just saved themselves, everyone would still live. No reason to try to blanket the world in protection by forging a 50plus% majority of blue.
Because I like to think I’m a smart guy and it took me a while to see how utterly stupid it was to push the blue button, I have a feeling people would push it, hoping they were joining the right side of history in saving their fellow man. Some people truly hope there are enough good people who would do the same, take that risk, for sake of the world.
But good people are not automatically smart people. Good intentions can destroy the world.
I actually think pushing the blue button is basically how a progressive thinks. They think they have to gamble and join a majority in order to save everyone - sacrifice certainty and security in order to make the world more certainly secure. Safety doesn’t arise without numbers. A right-winger thinks, everyone should save themselves, and the whole world would be safer and more predictable if everyone could take care of themselves and agreed that was the priority. So we are all fools or selfish, or some combination thereof.
I will say it simply. Anyone who would willingly destroy a large portion of humanity just to save themselves is an evil person, even if all of humanity would be saved if everyone went along with destroying the portion of humanity that did not agree with them.
If you had an indefinite supply of food, water, air, and electricity and a bunker, would you press the button to launch the missiles to start WWIII knowing that you would be safe and you would in the process destroy everyone that could threaten you? That is essentially what your logic amounts to.
Another way to put it would be this: RTLM has broadcast ‘Cut down the tall trees’. Will you take up the machete and kill those who refuse to do the same? As, of course, no one will die if everyone listens to RTLM’s call and procures machetes from the Interahamwe with intent of killing those who don’t.
So fun to balance the fate of others against moral judgment of others in our hands, isn’t it? Wonderful. Like I said, we’re all selfish or ignorant or some measure of both.
The only real difference is that the scenario in the OP has a threshold between where everyone who didn’t vote Red dies and no one who didn’t vote Red dies, whereas in this scenario how many people will ultimately die depends on how many people voted Red (i.e. take up the machete at the instigation of the RTLM), because if only a small number of people listen they won’t be able to machete everyone else to death.
The only difference is a massive difference, right. And of course there’s an additional difference of one choice leading to there being no trees, which would be an additional hugely negative thing for humanity.
