If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

If more than 50% press the blue button, everyone survives. Otherwise, only red button pressers survive. I think it’s immoral to encourage people to press the blue button. The prompt the prompt on X The possible outcomes Before I explain my view, let’s establish a baseline understanding of the possible outcomes. Predicting the likeliest outcome becomes a game of psychology, and depends on your beliefs around other people’s worldview. So clearly the worst possible outcome is one in which nearly 50% of people select blue, but not quite 50%. Then, nearly half of the world dies. The best possible outcome is one in which zero people die, and we can see there are two ways that can happen: no one selects blue 50% or more select blue We can think about how one’s selection of their perceived correct decision depends on their prediction of what others will choose. If you think there’s a: 10% chance that exactly 20% will choose blue, and a 20% chance that exactly 45% will choose blue, and a 30% chance that exactly 60% will choose blue, and a 40% chance that exactly 70% will choose blue then the expected number of deaths (where TP=Total Population) is (.1 * .2 * TP) + (.2 * .45 * TP) + (.3 * 0 * TP) + (.4 * 0 * TP) = .11 * TP = 11% of the total population. So in that case, you think the most likely outcome is that more than 50% choose blue, but in your head there’s still a 30% chance that fewer than 50% choose blue, and some large portion of the population would die in that case. Of course, in reality, one would be making predictions based on continuous ranges of probabilities, not four discrete buckets, but this is just for the sake of illustration. Simply: I believe the average person cares a lot about their own life and the lives of their loved ones My belief is that it’s very unlikely that more than 50% would select blue, regardless of how hard people push each other to go all in on selecting blue. We can see the empirical results from the poll on X: So you might be thinking, wow, well Kyle must be wrong. We can see that more than 50% selected blue. I think this is totally fallacious: People are answering from the comfort of their bed, scrolling on their phone in a safe and comfortable environment, casually thinking about an interesting hypothetical. They’re likely thinking about what the “correct” decision is rather than what their actual decision would be. I think if people’s actual lives were on the line, they would be dramatically less likely to choose the seemingly pro-social cooperative option. The fact that even given the above, it was only 8% above the cutoff should give the reader a lot of pause. Every person you encourage to choose blue is a potential life lost, every person you encourage to choose red will survive regardless of the outcome Let’s say you look at the above poll results and say, well OK I buy that people might be slightly less likely to choose blue in the real world, but I still think it’s most likely that > 50% will choose blue. But do you think there’s still a 10% possibility that < 50% will choose blue? If so, would you tell a loved one, who trusts you as a wise decision-maker, to choose blue? Would you accept that there’s a 10% chance that they will die? If you tell them to choose red, they will survive either way. Every parent in the world would be performing the above calculus, consciously or not. An alternative framing 🔫 Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves…

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