Ok let’s start with something that I think is pretty straight-forward: If your goal is to preserve the greatest number of the lives, the best option is the button that you think the MAJORITY of people will press. If you think 50+% choose red, then choosing blue is suicide. If you think 50+% choose blue, then choosing blue is joining the presumed majority in saving all lives.
So, to choose blue, you should be optimistic that the majority will choose blue, right? I’m wondering where people find that optimism?
Is it from online polls? That seems like flawed reasoning, for a large number of reasons. Most glaringly, that’s a biased sample. What sample size would you need for a representative sample of the 8 billion people on Earth? I imagine Twitter or Reddit or whatever, in addition to being a laughably tiny sample, is not even remotely representative of the total population. That’s a very Western, probably younger, potentially more educated, more online sample. It also suffers from having zero actual enforceable consequences. Choosing blue is easy for that reason, and because it’s morally comfy. In the pretend vote, you get to feel like you’re the hero. But for the hypothetical, you MUST envision real stakes. By choosing blue, there is a LEGITIMATE and far from zero risk of death. Plenty of people would love to say they would run straight towards a mass shooter, or into a burning building, but let’s be honest—a tiny fraction of the population would actually do so when push came to shove. Look at Uvalde. That’s a group of supposedly trained individuals who have on their own volition signed up for a career where RISKING YOUR LIFE is part of the job description. And yet, they sat outside for an hour while little children were brutally murdered, completely actionless. Does that scream blue button pusher to you?
We can go bigger than online polls. Look at COVID. Approximately 70% of the US population was fully vaccinated. Now 70% is better than the 50% necessary for the button press, but I don’t think that’s a very comfy margin for wagering your life personally—and that’s assuming full vaccination is a perfect proxy for “selflessness” on the button press. Which I don’t think it is personally, not at all. First, someone could be fully vaccinated and still have partaken in reckless activities that put others at risk. This is anecdotal, granted, but just to illustrate: I started college in 2020 and knew of people who got rescinded because, despite being fully vaccinated, they were going to house parties and then out into the community at the height of the pandemic. That certainly doesn’t seem like “for the good of society” behavior to me. Further, I’m sure plenty of people who were fully vaccinated would choose the red button. I’m one of those people. There is also numerous incentives to be fully vaccinated, many of which are not selfless. For example, some may have needed to be vaccinated in order to not lose their job and risk financial instability. Or to enroll in school. Look at shopping behavior from the pandemic. How do people still have faith in the general public after seeing how difficult it was to get just toilet paper? I understand that can come from a minority, but it also very well could be the majority mindset, no? Am I just jaded—genuinely asking?
The main gaps in my argument (that I can observe, open to hearing others) is that I have a very Western perspective. I admit I don’t really have ideas about how non-Western cultures view individualistic vs. collectivistic decisions, like being vaccinated for COVID. I also admit this is fairly anecdotal, but if there were a perfect measure for how people would respond, I don’t think this would be much of a debate.