In the red/blue button debate, blue is the correct choice only because of children and people who lack the capacity to decide for themselves.
If the debate was rephrased as only people who have the mental capacity to make a decision I would 100% choose red.
The following argument for choosing red is based on the assumption that only people who have the mental capacity of choosing for themselves are effected
Choosing red:
Imagine a scenario where the red button doesn’t exist, and you can either press the blue button or not press it. Same exact rules, everyone who presses the button dies unless it reaches a threshold of more than 50%, and if you don’t press it nothing happens to you.
Now the question is would you still press the blue button even though it’s the same premise?
What a lot of people don’t understand is that the red button effectively does nothing. In my scenario not pressing blue is the exact same thing as pressing red, but so many people call red pressers selfish. However, if people’s lives were actually at stake I know for a FACT that majority of people who claim to be blue pressers would cave and pick red.
“If you chose red you’re contributing to the deaths of everyone who chose blue”
The dilemma only exists if any nonzero number of blue choices exist, otherwise there’s literally no reason to. Pushing blue only creates an artificial problem that never existed. Pressing blue is like holding yourself at gun point and saying “if you dont hold yourself hostage as well it’s your fault that i die.”
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Why I still choose blue:
In real-world conditions, I’d still choose blue, and there’s some dumb arguments for pressing red
“If everyone just chose red then we’d all live”
Except it’s not gonna happen. It’s statistically impossible for over 8 billion people to choose the same button. Even if everyone was smart enough to understand that the red/blue question was actually misleading/deceptive, children, elderly, and so much more people will choose blue regardless. Although red is the logically “correct” choice as soon as you realize that there’s people that can’t decide for themselves it’s irrelevant whether you’re correct or not, and to the people who say that blue pressers deserve to die anyway, or it’s “natural selection” are horrible people.
The reason why this debate is so controversial is because it mixes between a clean theoretical choice and real world conditions. Even though choosing red is optimal under perfect conditions, people will still die under real world conditions.