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The Blue Button/Red Button Dilemma
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
in Philosophy
This game theory, moral dilemma has been going viral online at the moment. So I'm posting it here. I'll leave my thoughts out for now, but I'd ask in addition to just saying which one you'd pick say why and perhaps why you wouldn't push the other. That just makes it more interesting.
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?
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Blue button. I wouldn't want to live in a world with only selfish people.
I wouldn’t press either button, because I think Planet Earth would be better off without humans and their technology.
I would not press either button. But the blue button sounds the lesser evil option! Also, all of us dying, what an evil God or terrible government-spectator agency to live under!
This reminds me of the prisoner's dilema by the way.
"Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge. Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare—with minimizing his own prison sentence.[3]
This leads to three different possible outcomes for prisoners A and B:
If A and B both remain silent, they will each serve one year in prison.
If one testifies against the other but the other doesn’t, the one testifying will be set free while the other serves three years in prison.
If A and B testify against each other, they will each serve two years."
The thing with most thought experiments like this is they're extreme examples of real world dilemmas meant to take away the ability to avoid moral responsibility. The one presented here is similar to vaccination where taking one protects others. Opting out kind of avoids thinking about the moral implications of complex situations with no clear cut right choice. Many choices are tradeoffs between imperfect options rather perfectly good and bad outcomes.
So in this case opting out, since it's anonymous doesn't send any signal against the system and functionally is a non blue vote.
It is also a non red vote, meaning you vote against your own survival… consider it a protest option against the absurdity of the thought experiment.
If I must push a button, then it must be the BLUE button as all life is sacred.
The totalitarian death machine. It is a mad concept if you imagine it existing in the real world. 😏
Yes, its similar in that its a thought experiment in the world of game theoretics, which is the systematic study of how people and systems cooperate or don't (defect). It is a little different in that there isn't the explicit negative cost for choosing the selfish option.
There are lots of real world examples of prisoner's dilemmas playing out. Something like arms races or addressing climate change. Its in each sides selfish interest to defect, but when both sides do it the outcome is worse than when both sides cooperate.
The somewhat good news is that the optimal solution for the prisoners dilemma change significantly when there is repeated interaction. If someone defected previously there is less chance of trusting them and each side has the ability to learn that cooperation works better.
I think this is really interesting. A while back they held a coding competition to see which strategy produced the best outcomes over repeated interactions, and overwhelmingly the "good" strategies won out. I think this video by Veritasium is fantastic and has an optimistic result.
Its true that these sorts of things aren't everyone's cup of tea.
I see them as training exercises for our moral intuitions. Our base intuitive sense is evolved for small group, face to face interactions. The world is far more complex and we're working on statistic harms, anonymous interactions, systemic harm and good rather than person to person. Something like an experienced doctor gets a better gut feeling for what may be wrong after years of training and seeing sick people.
I remember a while ago, this view of yours came up. I mentioned the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, you didn't seem to have a connection to it. I wonder if you've developed a more explicit view around this idea since?
I also wonder if this isn't a source of much of our conflicts? I have a very humanist view and yours is fairly misanthropic, but maybe some sort of positive misanthropy that isn't just negative but sees a preferable alternative.
When I first heard the blue/red button dilemma my instinct was blue. I thought about it a bit and worried that blue had the potential for human extinction, so I thought red. But that wouldn't be the actual case, there would be lots of red people who live. I then moved somewhere similar to @zorro, the world left with all the selfless, cooperative people gone would be a pretty bad world. I think we take for granted how much of the world depends on a base level of cooperative systems and behavior. Last I realized that since everyone has to play is that there would be a lot of children and other innocents or mistaken pushers who pushed blue and they need to be protected.
So back to my initial feeling, but now backed by reasons and words!
Do we have conflicts? I have a genuine fondness for you and your very pragmatic stance, and although you have a habit of pulling me out of my comfortable dreamworlds, that is perfectly fine and perhaps good for me.
I don’t consider my views misanthropic, merely that I don’t think that mankind will be able to maintain a middle way between capitalist systems feeding consumerist desires of the masses, and preservation of the ecology. Every year the planets old growth forests keep shrinking, more of the Amazon gets burned, more unsustainable fishing gets done, more humans are added. Eventually it will all be gone, and what is left of the wild will be a few National Parks. Everything will be owned, managed and used.
My feeling is that the planet’s wild nature makes it more alive, more expressive, more unique and numinous, than when the planet is managed by technological humans. I don’t think mankind will ever get off this planet, the spacecraft launch and propulsion systems haven’t evolved much since the 1950’s. Instead, it will get more and more crowded. Where there were once real forests there will now be managed woodlands of a single fast-growing species of tree regularly cut for wood chips to make IKEA furniture.
All the lifeblood will be drained from the world, leaving a place optimised to sustain the greatest number of humans in the most possible comfort for the least amount of money and effort. Adventures will be packaged and sold as a commodity, very safe, sanitised, for those able to afford them. This is not a vision of the future, this world exists today. But it will get more and more visible, at the cost of Mother Nature and her wildlife.
I don’t see the value in all these extra humans — there will be 100.000 plumbers and taxi drivers for each great artist, people who live brief lives to maintain the great human system. The great mass of human thought will be 90% fallacies and fantasies, and perhaps 10% science which is of limited use,
I appreciate the validation of my perspective. Its meaningful.
I don't know that seems pretty misanthropic to my ears. But it is a spectrum like all things and someone like Krishnamurti received criticism for sliding into a misanthropic attitude. It doesn't have to mean an overt hatred for all of humankind. Its not that its observations are wrong, but in relation to a hopeful or supportive view of humankind its relatively more pessimistic and misanthropic.
Pulling this one out specifically. Its not like people maintaining humanity are just mindless cogs in a machine. Most people are able to live meaningful lives with connection and purpose. You don't need to be a great artist or scientist to have value.
The hope is that we can have systems and norms in place that hold on to and build off the 10% while the 90% falls away. So over time humanity builds and iterates on the good.
I had a look at the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement in a little more detail, and I find myself sympathising with their views. Some of the quotes I found on their Wikipedia page, like “All the works of Shakespeare and Einstein are not worth the existence of the Tiger” and “Thank you for not breeding!” are very much in my line.
I decided when I was 12 or so not to have children because of the overpopulation problem, and I have stuck with that decision. The views of the Earth from space show us one planet, without divisions of nations or culture, with a thin skin of habitable atmosphere. We should treasure that, not exploit it.
You say most people are able to live meaningful lives, but what is the meaning in a human life? I haven’t been able to find it, beyond “leave the world a better place than you found it” and nearly all people fail miserably at that. My conclusion is most people are not of much worth, and western civilisation is not much better than a cancer on the natural Earth.
You hope that mankind will iterate on the good, but towards what? That faith in progress seems to me a fallacy, it is a process of optimisation towards some future state which may not be better at all. I am far from the only one to think so, the twentieth century’s cultural landscape is strewn with warnings of dystopia.
But that my view on mankind’s purpose on Earth is gloomy just means my joys come from the small things in life… my morning coffee, the birdsong in my garden, a little sunshine, a bicycle ride through the park.
Very interesting conversation. I do not wish to have children and I have met people that are constantly exploiting the housing crisis to refurbish flats once designed to host a family of 4 into flats of 7 rooms for up to 14 people. I find this terrible. Poisoned view.
Why create this dreadful style of living to others that you would not wish to your own?
I have also notice how "social" media is becoming an attention trap and people are more and more worried about mundane and arbitrary rubbish. Before we would have the constructs of God, State, Nation, etc. Now we have this idea of satisfying one's identity, the pursuit of the self. This is what I really liked about the Thai Forest Tradition and Zen. This idea of "enough noise", "enough clutter".
I do feel that sometimes detonating a few nuclear warheads would be the easy way out but, just like the birds chirping outside your home, a happy home, smiling human beings, people engaging in activities for the sake of others (including nature and other species)... I wish to continue generating good and hoping for happy human beings that break away from unwholesome patterns. This is hard but who knows!
Have you heard of the Olduvai theory @Jeroen ? Maybe we just need a hard-reset like with computers when you get blue screened.
All of this was written from an iPad by the way.
Thank you, I had not heard of it but had worked out a similar picture of humanities future in my head a while ago. The problem is the picture of energy sources is complex, with renewables like wind and solar now generating net positive amounts and nuclear reactors powered by thorium potentially giving a much longer energy horizon than uranium which is a pretty rare element.
I think it is likely that technologically complex human civilisation may last another thousand years, before the breakdown of the biosphere causes a collapse. The limits on renewing topsoil and the insatiable appetites of human populations will probably combine in a fatal way for civilisation, unless human ingenuity comes to the rescue.
It kind of makes me sad to hear someone think like that. It reminds me a bit of a slightly different frame sometimes expressed as a sort of ultimate purpose existential crisis. Like, what is the point if the Earth will burn up in a few billion years. My answer is that the point is life right now, the joys and connections that we can all experience now. Something like your last paragraph.
Why can't everyone experience this, is it just reserved for you? To me, life has lots of opportunity for joy and meaning. I suppose I find this more beautiful and meaningful than a wild planet, I enjoy nature, but if that's it, what's the point?
This is what humans are on planet Earth for… playing with baby elephants…
https://youtube.com/shorts/A0diovYUlw8
Something about the framing of humans needing to be for something hits me wrong. I can't really place my finger on it.
Its like are humans "for" anything at all, why does the value of a human, or humans in general depend on some sort of ultimate purpose?
It’s only an example. Humans can manifest happiness, playfulness, joy. And that may be as good as it gets.
I was in the process of adding an edit when I got the notification that you posted. I was adding something to the effect of having some larger notion of the purpose or value of humanity that they're failing to meet, then yes humans are a sort of obstacle or detriment. I think my previously unexamined motivation is that what humans are for is to have a meaningful, happy life. Lets wish them wellbeing rather than elimination.
Perhaps this is a bone I can throw you. I remember reading The Celestine Prophecy where it had a vision of a sparser human future more in tune with the natural world while also being technologically advanced. That vision of humanity has stuck with me and is something I can sign onto.
But it seems that most of them are caught up in the rat race — money, ambition, power, material possessions — and define a meaningful life in those terms. That has consequences for our natural world, and seems to me to be a wrong turn on the path.
Forever and ever, amen?
I think its more about what we do, than it is about how the world is. We can't control the outcomes, all we can do is try to be of benefit.
I think there is something around a comment I made in another thread about reframing the mundane. Following Richie Davidson's advice rather than seeing the cleaning of the litter box as a chore, see it as a benefit to others. Your living companions benefit by not having to do the work, it benefits guests to not have to see and smell it, it benefits the cat by having a clean litterbox. A prayer I've started my meditation sessions with has an intent that this and other spiritual practices are done in order to be of benefit to others. As it has slowly seeped in over the years, it makes a big difference. The activity may be quite the same, but the mental attitude and outlook are very different. Not in a binary, all at once way, but gradually, drop by drop.
And what path exactly? This circles back to what I was saying about what humans are for. The thing you have in mind doesn't seem to be the thing I have in mind. And the unexamined thing you have in mind isn't some universal, unimpeachable truth.