What red buttoners keep missing
I think there’s a rational case for pressing either button, but one thing I keep noticing from red button arguments is that they implicitly assume that most rational people will obviously press red.
The logic usually goes:
- pressing red guarantees your own survival
- if everyone presses red, everyone survives
- therefore red is the rational choice
Individually that logic is perfectly understandable but here’s the issue: when have you ever seen an actual red vs blue poll end up anywhere close to 100% red?
Never. At least I haven't.
Blue is almost always a substantial percentage of the vote, sometimes it’s even the majority. Those polls are the closest empirical evidence we have for how real humans actually respond to this dilemma, so I think there’s a disconnect here between the theoretical model and observed behavior.
Just to clarify: I’m not saying the game theory reasoning is wrong. There clearly is a valid self preservation argument for red, my point is that many red arguments quietly rely on assumptions like:
- near perfect convergence toward red
- identical reasoning across billions of people
- people prioritizing individual certainty above all else
But again, we have empirical evidence of how actual humans do not behave uniformly. And before someone says “people would answer differently if the stakes were real”; sure, probably. But that cuts both ways. You can’t just assume that real stakes magically produce universal agreement. The existence of a large blue minority in basically every version of this poll already shows that different people evaluate the dilemma fundamentally differently. So the issue isn’t whether red is rational, rather whether it makes sense to model humanity as if everyone will arrive at the exact same conclusion under uncertainty, when empirically, they clearly don’t.