Button Poll #2: Only those with normal cognitive capacity are given buttons.

[Thermal]

I would argue with that first sentence at least. The words associated are "only red is guaranteed to survive."

Cpoypasting from our very own OP:

"Everyone on earth has to press a red or blue button. If <50% pick blue, only the red survive. If >50% pick blue, everyone survives."

Maybe semantic, maybe not, but thems the exact words posed that we've been referring to.

Either option is a gamble, The big difference is that the red pusher gambles with other lives, and the blue pusher with his own.

Agreed. The nature of the argument for many pages now has been the Reds trying to conjure up a way of looking at this where they are not doing so, and in fact are uninterestedly passive. It's an obviously uphill battle but bless their hearts, they are trying.

 

[The_Animus]

The words associated with pushing the Red button are "Only Red Survives".

What would you say those words mean in the English language?

That is one way of framing it, and as we've seen different framing implies different culpability.

When the scenario is framed such that there is only a blue button and if less than half of people push it they die, the implication is that the blue pushers are culpable.

When the scenario is framed such that there is only a Red button and if more than half of people push it everyone who doesn't dies, the implicating is that the red pushers are culpable.

But the reality is that neither is true. Whatever force is creating and enforcing the scenario is entirely responsible for the deaths, not blue or red.

Eta: it doesn't matter what your 'intent' is, when the result of your vote is for people to die. You can yip yap about forks and lava pits and radiation chambers til you are blue in the face, and the effect of the vote is still for blues to die. It's literally in the OP wording.

Intent is often a factor for moral and legal culpability and I don't think anywhere would find the red voters culpable.

Does your reasoning used here apply to Israel?

It doesn't matter what Israel or it's supporters 'intent' is, when the result of their actions is Palestinian genocide. You can yip yap about who started it and human shields till you are blue in the face and the effect of the actions are still dead Palestinians. It's literally what happened in real life.

 

[Thermal]

That is one way of framing it, and as we've seen different framing implies different culpability.

As long as the frames are actually describing an analogous scenario. Many presented here aren't.

When the scenario is framed such that there is only a blue button and if less than half of people push it they die, the implication is that the blue pushers are culpable.

When the scenario is framed such that there is only a Red button and if more than half of people push it everyone who doesn't dies, the implicating is that the red pushers are culpable.

The thing is, those framings are not indicated in the OP. There are two buttons, even though, as you rightly note, the dilemmas will be very similar.

But the reality is that neither is true. Whatever force is creating and enforcing the scenario is entirely responsible for the deaths, not blue or red.

Good example- the force, whatever that may be, asks the people what they want, and requires a legit majority (not just the majority of willing voters that had an opt-out option, which is a whole different game). Would that entity actually be responsible for a Red win? Didn't the people vote for exactly that, given a clear choice for Everyone Survives?

I mean yeah, you could persuasively argue that we shouldnt be faced with such a choice in the first place, but the *reason* for the button push was not disclosed. Could we not equally assume the population demanded it?

Intent is often a factor for moral and legal culpability and I don't think anywhere would find the red voters culpable.

Tougher argument. If you were to push a button (that for whatever reason allowed executions by majority vote) and you willingly pushed "Hell ya, the Blues die", I think you would have a tough argument that there was not intent.

Does your reasoning used here apply to Israel?

It doesn't matter what Israel or it's supporters 'intent' is, when the result of their actions is Palestinian genocide. You can yip yap about who started it and human shields till you are blue in the face and the effect of the actions are still dead Palestinians. It's literally what happened in real life.

I hear you, but the analogy doesn't hold. Human Sheilds and background history actually happened, and are fair game for determining culpability. Lava pits and trolleys are entirely imaginary. I don't think anyone is applying funky imaginary dilemmas to Israeli military actions.

 

[bruto]

That is one way of framing it, and as we've seen different framing implies different culpability.

When the scenario is framed such that there is only a blue button and if less than half of people push it they die,
the implication is that the blue pushers are culpable.
When the scenario is framed such that there is only a Red button and if more than half of people push it everyone who doesn't dies, the implicating is that the red pushers are culpable.

But the reality is that neither is true. Whatever force is creating and enforcing the scenario is entirely responsible for the deaths, not blue or red.



Intent is often a factor for moral and legal culpability and I don't think anywhere would find the red voters culpable.

Does your reasoning used here apply to Israel?

It doesn't matter what Israel or it's supporters 'intent' is, when the result of their actions is Palestinian genocide. You can yip yap about who started it and human shields till you are blue in the face and the effect of the actions are still dead Palestinians. It's literally what happened in real life.

Semantics maybe, but I don't see this as meaning the blue pushers are culpable. Blue pushers are adding to the likelihood of not dying and pushing, which is the only positive thing they can do, has no down side. There is truly no reason not to push it. The decision by the grand master of poohbah to make only the blue button available makes "blue button activity" responsible, and culpability, if any is there at all, is attached to the pushing decision, but only because not pushing it has a negative result; but if pushing it makes you culpable then there is nobody left who is not. The term loses its meaning.

But I also agree that "culpable" is not a very fitting term for red button pushers in the posted problem. There may be many reasons for the decision, and it is, like most such decision problems, engineered in a way that makes neither answer unequivocally good or bad. I think that if you were a certain kind of person, to whom the "culpable" label might be attached, you'd pretty certainly push red, but the reverse is not the same.

 

[Emily's Cat]

As already explained, the buttons indicate what happens if more than 50% press it and that choice wins. If 60% pick blue and 40% pick red, then only the blue button tells you what is going to happen next, as only its condition has been met. If you like, I can make the labels more verbose to cover this:

"If more than 50% press this button, only red survives."
"If more than 50% press *this* button, everyone survives".

It doesn't change anything, but hopefully, it will clear up your confusion.

With that out of the way, you still need to explain why you think that somebody who presses a button labeled "if more than 50% press this button, only red survives" isn't voting for blue voters to die.

That's more accurate than your original labels.

I would argue that it's equally true to say:

"If less than 50% press this button, all of them will die"
"Anyone who pushes this button will live"

 

[Emily's Cat]

Lol, how's it feel? Frustrating? Aggrivating?
View attachment 72131

You know what? I'm just going to take this as your silent acknowledgement that there is absolutely no logical or functional difference between the scenarios, and that your choice is based on motivated reasoning.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Well, not every election is a two-way, FPTP, but this one clearly is, and I'm sure EC is familiar with how those work.

It's clearly not. It's entirely possible to have a scenario in which BOTH groups win. As has been the case in every single version of this poll. In an actual FPTP, it's impossible for both options to win - one must always lose.

 

[Thermal]

You know what? I'm just going to take this as your silent acknowledgement that there is absolutely no logical or functional difference between the scenarios, and that your choice is based on motivated reasoning.

Motivated reasoning indeed. Motivated by practicality.

Eta: all these kooky scenarios are pointless. Whatever similarities they have are eclipsed by the fact that radical reframing destroys the analogy. They don't compare anymore when you make one choice inactive or assign goofy pleading for help and suicidal tendencies that aren't happening.

They work the other way too, you know. Blue can be 'framed' as a null, and Reds are doing all the killing non-negotiably. Instead of pretending the dilemma is some other reframed dilemma, why not just deal with the dilemma posed, warts and all?

 

[Emily's Cat]

At first I thought, surely we aren't mixing up 'label explaining a 50% win condition' and 'label explaining what happens when the button is pressed' but all of EC's arguments appear to think of the question as the latter, now that I look at them. A blue press is always a 'cliff jump' with an awkward 'potentially saved by more cliff jumpers' scenario added rather than a risk that may or may not materialise depending on how many red presses there are in the end.

There's a deeper issue involved in how this discussion has developed.

I will once again point out that I personally don't think either choice is wrong or right - they're just different perspectives on how much risk a person is willing to take in which situations. Different people have different tolerance for risk. I don't think that choosing red is bad or evil, nor do I think that choosing blue is bad or evil.

What I have noted throughout this discussion, however, is that many who most vocally support the Blue option seem to be completely blind to the fact that they are actively shifting accountability onto other people. They continue to frame their choice to take on avoidable risk as a "good" or "moral" choice, and they blame the risk of death on people who did not choose to take on an avoidable risk.

Blues are doing something that they know is very dangerous, and they're blaming the potential downside on people who did NOT do the dangerous thing.

This blame-shifting, this shirking of personal accountability for their own choices, is something I find extremely objectionably.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The label and the result of the red button are not always the same, but I would label the red button "the survival of anyone but myself is none of my business." What button you press doesn't matter for the rest of the world as long as enough other people think it does.

Fortunately, this actual problem can never actually be implemented, and similar, less simplistic, real problems are not likely to have such certain life and death results, but it does have some relevance to the kind of society you think you want. Of course in some sense the practical solution is to push the red button, and consider those who do not woke and stupid, just as the practical solution to many issues is to shoot before you're shot.

Alternatively... I want a society that recognizes obvious danger and avoids it, rather than blithely swanning in to potential death and relying on everyone else to save them.

You choose here not only what your own fate is but the character of the society you live in. Instead of life and death, what happens if you make this dichotomy one of slavery? Push the red button and if there's slavery, you'll be a master. Push the blue button and you're either a slave or slavery itself ends.

I think this is a fundamental change to the underlying framework. Nobody who chooses red wants other people to die; nobody who chooses red wants to be a master. Red wants to not be a slave. That's all. A more accurate comparison would be: Push the red button if you don't want to be a slave; push the blue button if you're willing to risk becoming a slave unless more than 50% also push blue in which case nobody will be a slave.

You're eliding the voluntary risk taking aspect of the issue.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The words associated with pushing the Red button are "Only Red Survives"

Motivated reasoning.

Framing 1: You have two buttons, and everyone has to push one. If less than half of the people push the blue button, then only the people who pressed the red button will survive. If more than half the people push the blue button, then everyone will survive.​

​

Framing 2: You have two buttons. Everyone who pushes the red button will survive. People who push the blue button will die unless more than half of all people push the blue button.​

Now... what's the functional and logical difference between those two framings?

Go on then, Thermal. Explain what the actual difference is, other than words that prompt an emotional response from you?

 

[Emily's Cat]

I don't need to know that. All I need to know is that somebody will (and I am sure as eggs is eggs that somebody will).


You can just as truthfully put the second sentence as 'And if enough of you stand on the platform that operates the trap door, then all of us on the trap door will be killed. By falling through the trap door. That you collectively operated.'

Get off the goddamned trap door that could lead to your death! Don't blame the people who decided NOT to taunt death. The shifting of accountability is astonishing.

Look, if you walked up and found just one guy standing on a trap door over a lethal drop, and you saw someone else walk up and grab the lever that would operate that trap door, would you not yell, 'oh my gosh, don't pull that lever, you'll kill that guy!' Even though it could be framed as 'the guy already signified he was willing to risk forefiting his own life by getting on the trap door, and it's no business of mine what happens to him now.'

That's a very different scenario. You've fundamentally altered the situation, in a way similar to what Thermal has done on a few occasions. You've now introduced a lever, rather than a platform. You've now introduced something that requires intentional action to try to kill the other group, rather than a passive action of declining to take risk

If I walked up and found a guy standing on a trap door, I would most likely assume that they didn't know it was a trap door, and were unaware that there was a lethal drop beneath. I would assume that guy is a "baby". I would try to convince the guy to get off the potentially lethal trap door, and I would also try to convince other people not to walk onto the other platform until the "baby" was safely removed.

What you've tried to do is to introduce a functionally different situation. They're not isomorphic. You've introduced 1) a situation where the observer doesn't know if the person on the trap door is aware of the risk or not (a baby), and you've also introduced 2) an action that knowingly and intentionally tries to kill the other.

I am just not getting your insistence that pressing red is a passive action that does nothing.

In the abstract, it isn't. But of course I'd find if preferable if you would not actively throw in for the negative consequences coming about. (Though I can't blame you for wanting to pick what you see as the failsafe option.)

What I am really not understanding from your POV is how little you think all the blue deaths will affect your life if red does get over 50%.

Of course they'd affect my life, and that would really suck. But it would suck more to be dead.

Especially since that seems to be one of the main reasons the blue pressers choose to press blue; trying to avoid deaths by choosing what seems to them to be the only achievable way to avoid all deaths. They understand a 100% red outcome would also avoid all deaths, but honestly don't think it's achievable if we're running this choice past the average adult population of earth.

I have a lot less trust in strangers than you do perhaps. Given that I've been harmed by strangers and had other strangers do absolutely nothing at all about it, I don't think my lack of trust is entirely misplaced.

I also have considerable doubts about whether or not people would actually push blue if this absurd imaginary scenario were to become real. I sincerely think that when the rubber meets the road, a lot of people who say they would push blue to save everyone would be faced with the reality that by doing so, they could die and leave their children and spouses without support, they could leave their parents and their loved ones without care or income.

The classic trolley problem is a good thought exercise, but it's a very, very poor model for real life behavior. In the thought problem, somewhere around 80% of people say they'd pull the lever and kill one person to save five. But in reality, they don't - most people are extremely averse to the need to directly cause someone's death. Even small tweaks to the thought problem produce very different results - the variant where instead of pulling a lever you have to actually push one large person onto the track to save five further down produces a significant drop in people willing to do so.

This question, the button question, is very interesting because the framing induces motivated reasoning. Look at how many people in this thread are stuck on "only the red survive" as their motivating factor. The use of language that sounds exclusionary drives a bias. Remove that language, and even though the scenarios are isomorphic - they're functionally and logically identical - people insist that they're different.

Even more obviously, is if you remove the forced choice aspect of having to physically push the red button... suddenly the entire feeling around the choice alters dramatically:

A Blue button appears before you, and you're told that anyone who pushes the button will die unless at least 50% of humanity pushes the button

The actual logic involved is the same. The only difference is that instead of pushing the red button to decline the risk, you just don't push the blue button. Same functionality, same outcome - completely different reception.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Either option is a gamble, The big difference is that the red pusher gambles with other lives, and the blue pusher with his own.

If you were pushing the button on behalf of the person you love the most, rather than your own... which button would you push for them? Would you gamble the lives of strangers to ensure their safety? Or would you gamble their death and just hope everyone else is willing to risk their loved ones as well?

 

[Emily's Cat]

As long as the frames are actually describing an analogous scenario. Many presented here aren't.

They've all been functionally and logically identical. Each and every variation I've presented has been a choice between guaranteed safety and potential death. In every single situation, the blue-equivalent option is clearly fatal unless a specific threshold is reached, and the red-equivalent is always non-fatal. Every single alternative framing I've presented has been very intentionally a choice to take avoidable and life-threatening risk that will be mitigated if the risk is spread to a large enough number of people... versus a choice to avoid the risk entirely.

 

[Thermal]

They've all been functionally and logically identical.

They are neither. They are very similar.

Each and every variation I've presented has been a choice between guaranteed safety and potential death.

Ya no ◊◊◊◊. That's your preferred framework, and it's that of a used car salesman trying to sweep a cars horrors out of eyesight, hoping a buyer won't notice.

Every Red push bring the vote closer to 51% and death for others. Every button push for Blue brings the vote closer to their 51% and Everyone Survives. Those are the important bits that get covered up by your used car salesman framing.

I do acual building framing professionally, which is why I so strongly dislike deceptive framing. It is supremely critical that a framework addresses all its structural elements. If you sweep important bits under the rug, you have a catastrophic collapse, no matter how "functionally logical and identical" you insist they were. You missed the big stuff, so your framing was unstable.

 

[Thermal]

If you were pushing the button on behalf of the person you love the most, rather than your own... which button would you push for them? Would you gamble the lives of strangers to ensure their safety? Or would you gamble their death and just hope everyone else is willing to risk their loved ones as well?

I wouldn't gamble their death- that's pushing Red, obviously. I'd be voting for Everyone Survives, because that's what I want, not piles of corpses.

Red voters are always talking about "me" or in the case of your example, one other person. I love more people than I can count offhand, and want all of them to survive. Would it be a deadly risk? Only in theory. In practice, Blue wins. It's a safe bet, because people generally don't vote to kill others when an Everyone Survives option is available.

 

[Thermal]

Re: frameworks again:

Red advocates like to bring up the game theory grid, the one that shows how each voting outcome affects the individual voter. In it, it is invariably shown that only Blue can die. The opposite can be done too, showing which vote kills others, in which case that's Red at over 50%. Blue cannot cause the deaths of others.

If both of these elements are not addressed in one of these crackhead reframeworkings, then the reframeworking is probably intentionally dishonest. That's the objection to all this horse ◊◊◊◊ about passive Reds and suicidal Blues.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

That's more accurate than your original labels.

They are more *explicit* than my original labels. The latter were always accurate.

I would argue that it's equally true to say:

"If less than 50% press this button, all of them will die"
"Anyone who pushes this button will live"

Your labels don't mention what happens if more than 50% press blue. That is a crucial omission. Also, who is "them"?

There is no good reason not to label each button with the collective outcome that will go into effect if a majority press it. This is how choices are typically marked on ballots, and people generally understand those. It's also how the outcomes and their triggers are described in the OP.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

It's clearly not. It's entirely possible to have a scenario in which BOTH groups win. As has been the case in every single version of this poll. In an actual FPTP, it's impossible for both options to win - one must always lose.

If by "both groups win" you mean "everyone survives", yes, of course it is possible. And that outcome is far easier to achieve if people vote blue, since you only need a bare majority, rather than a unanimity that will never happen.

However, the choice presented in the OP can be read as a contest between two proposed rules: "Everybody survives" and "Only the Red Survive". Both of those rules cannot be voted into effect.

 

[bruto]

Alternatively... I want a society that recognizes obvious danger and avoids it, rather than blithely swanning in to potential death and relying on everyone else to save them.

I think this is a fundamental change to the underlying framework. Nobody who chooses red wants other people to die; nobody who chooses red wants to be a master. Red wants to not be a slave. That's all. A more accurate comparison would be: Push the red button if you don't want to be a slave; push the blue button if you're willing to risk becoming a slave unless more than 50% also push blue in which case nobody will be a slave.

You're eliding the voluntary risk taking aspect of the issue.

Sure, nobody pressing the red button wants other people to die, because essentially they want nothing for anyone but themselves. You see blue button as "relying on everyone else to save them." There's a significance to the way you put that.