But when you are conveying the voting rules to everyone, are they allow to ask the rules and implications and the organizers obligated to explain the consequences of the actions the voters will received? and what is the window of time between the votes and the consequences, like immediate after the tally, or a very long delay, or even before the voting has finished, when the absolute 50% number has reached? and how long the voting process will take, what happened if people stalled the choice?
- A hungry monster is approaching and will arrive tomorrow. Everyone has to decide independently to run away now or to stay. If 50% people stay and hold the cityâs gate closed, everybody will be safe, the monster will go away and life will be back to normal. If less than 50% people stay, the monster will push the gate, eat people who are present, and those who ran away will be able to come back and continue life as usual.
Would you run away or stay?
- Two candidates run for presidency, Mr Blueman and Mr Redman. Their political programs are strictly identical, and everybody is certain that they will apply it, except for one difference: if he wins, Mr Redman will kill every Blueman voter.
Would you vote for Mr Blueman or Mr Redman?
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Î) I do not have delusions of grandeur that somehow I am smarter than âbillions of peopleâ in the world and that âthey need to be savedâ by my choice.
B) It is a simple enough choice that everyone can understand or be given to understand, if they ask for clarifications.
Blue is the only choice that introduces ANY sort of risk in the whole issue.
Therefore choosing blue is, in fact, the risky choice.
You are treating a litmus test of basic logic, as a âcollective coordination problemâ.
However, there is no coordination in the experiment, since no way of communicating is provided between the participants, as was replied/specified here:
Therefore it is, an âindividual choice riskâ.
Only for those that assume that âbillions of peopleâ are somehow incapable of understanding the premise of the problem and thus âneed savingâ. 
If people understand the simple choices set bt the problem, then noone will introduce any risk for their own selves (simple self-preservation is not a hard concept to sell to anyone) and thus no risk will ever come for the collective.
You could alter this test to say this:
100 people are on an airplane and given this choice:
If you push the red button you stay on the airplane and keep going to your destination.
If you press the blue button then you are getting tossed out of the airplane. If 50+% of the people choose the the blue button and follow you into free falling then you all get a parachute and survive, otherwise the people who chose to get tossed out, will fall to their deaths.
Would you still press the blue button? 
It is the exact same test, but with a much more clear premise of the primarily personal (and secondarily collective) risks involved.
So, as I said earlier, there is no moral issue here if someone chooses to stay on the plane.
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This is why I said the framing of the questions matters a lot, and the window of consequence also matters a lot, as well as the âinstitutionâ of the organizer and the voters matter as well, since if there is a moral dilemma where the choices are dire, people might choose to do nothing, or even refuse to partake even overthrown the organizer if they donât have the power to force the choices.
Will the monster host a Q&A before it arrives?
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Here is an another alternative framing.
100 people are asked this question:
Would you like to gamble with your life on the line?
â No. (red)
â If yes (blue), then if 51+ people (including youself) also agree to gamble with their lives, then all 100 people will be safe, otherwise only the gamblers die.
If the word gambling was used (because thatâs what it is), the problem would have been even easier to resolve.
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This is incorrect. No communication doesnât mean that it isnât a coordination problem, as a matter of fact itâs exactly the lack of communication that creates the problem in the first place. The outcome depends on how peopleâs choices align under uncertainty, which is precisely what coordination problems are about.
The core issue here is that you are basically saying âif everyone reasons correctly, there is no riskâ but this assumes perfect reasoning + identical values + zero deviation across billions of people. It is simple enough to show how that canât happen by looking at the votes in this very thread. We were all given the same question and yet as of now, with 19 voters, there is a clear devide between red and blue. This clearly shows how the âobvious choiceâ isnât that obvious at all, unless you honestly believe that all the ones that voted blue are mentally impaired lol
This seems intuitive and correct but actually you are just making it feel like blue is an obvious irrational risk, and red is the default safe option. In reality, blue is the only path to universal survival while red is guaranteed survival for self, but potentially fatal for others. Your analogy is hiding the collective benefit of picking blue.
This is also misleading, saying blue is the only risky choice only considers individual risk. At the collective level red creates risk because if enough people choose it, others die. Blue is personally risky, but itâs the only option where everyone survives if enough people align.
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There is an even more âsimpleâ framing using the original prisonerâs dilemma, and instead of the two, now we have three people as partners in crime, and they are facing death penalty charges
If two or more stay silent (blue), and only one confesses(red), there is no sufficient evidence to convict, and everyone gets the same sentence of 10 years and lives. But if two confess, only the one who stays silent gets the death penalty, the two who confess get to have 10 years of sentence and live. Would the prisoners choose to confess or stay silent?
The only âchangeâ to the original prisonerâs dilemma is that there will be no penalty if they all stay silent, and no prison time at all, which will have a difference balance in the equation, depending on the cost (or benefit).
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Not gonna lie. That was discussed in my friend group and I instantly said red.
Thatâs wrong. The whole idea of the problem is if everyone presses red, then noone dies. (or in your words, if everyone confesses, then noone gets a death penalty anyways)
In my opinion in the original version which this gets asked to everyone in the world, there is absolutely no rational pressing blue. Because the events of âyour choiceâ and âother peopleâs choiceâ are independent events, which makes (with really really high probability, like 99.999%) your choice and the overall outcome independent events as well. (The only time your choice really matters if there would be a tie or 1 vote difference without your vote, and when we remember the world population is 8.3 billion and even 0.001% difference in votes is equivalent of 83000 votes, you can basically understand your vote is never doing the difference)
Which means either you risk dying for no reason or you press the red and guarantee survival. The choice should be clear.
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In game theory, you first solve the simpler equilibrium before applying it to a generalized solution (if there is any), thus my comment about the change of cost/penalty, which is not about extrapolating it at a larger scale directly and skip all the steps in between. What I am saying is that the original framing has an element/variable that differs from this thought experiment, which, if extrapolated on a larger scale, will result in if people press the red button, there will be a cost as a consequence, instead of free, which will change the equilibrium. (Letâs say everyone who presses the red button will not die when they are in the majority, but shortens their expected lifespan by 10 years). This will be the case for an expanded prisonerâs dilemma to the whole world.
And it is not a simple extrapolation of the equilibrium of a simpler case to the whole world, though, in either case. And we had done experiments of the prisonerâs dilemma in real studies, simple or expanded on different scale, and the results generally speaking is that the framing matter a lot, the relation with the organizers/observers have effect, and people are not rational, and the equilibrium are not conclusive and people rarely followed through with them.
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You are saying that events are independent, therefore your choice doesnât matter, which is just wrong. You are implicitly claiming that your vote is independent from the outcome, but the outcome is literally a function of all votes. Even if your individual marginal effect is small, that does not mean independence of your vote from the outcome.
This is a threshold fallacy, even though your individual vote is unlikely to be decisive, your individual influence is not irrelevant and aggregated across people it will determines the result. If everyone thinks âmy vote doesnât matterâ the system breaks by design
The issue with this is that you assume that a rational person would go for maximilizing individual survival, but the problem is a coordination and collective outcome system where ârationalâ depends on assumptions about others.
In other words, your solution only works if everyone acts like their action has no effect on others, which is a strange definition of rationality, and also explicitly false in this scenario.
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So we seem to have two teams:
- Of course I press blue. Only someone cold-hearted and selfish could press red.
- Of course I press red. Only someone retarded or with a completely irrational mind could press blue.
Does anyone have a more balanced view?
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I like purple, push both buttons at once, the murder computer segfaults and everyone lives.
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Rational does not necessarily mean acting according to only oneâs own self-interests. While, of course, nearly everyone greatly values their own life, they mostly like also greatly value the lives of many others as well (family, friends, etc.).
Pressing red guarantees oneâs personal safety, but does nothing to help address the risk faced by others. Sure, you can say that itâs a personal responsibility to press red to save yourself, however, as others have noted, you cannot really guarantee that everyone will come to the same conclusions and press red, even if you asked them to.
I think itâs perfectly rational for people to press blue, if their values include protecting the lives of others. For example, imagine entering that voting booth with uncertainty about which button your senile mother or young son pressed.
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The lexicon says that it is not incorrect, but even if we assume that it is, then this problem is even more meaningless, since there is no practical application of the âcoordination without communicationâ idea. I cannot think of any such case, of any practical meaning, for humans. If you can, Iâd be happy to hear of them.
Two issues here:
a) I never said that any of those choices is the âobvious choiceâ, so the point of your paragraph is misplaced.
b) I never said anything about mental impairments. That is your addition.
What I did say is that:
a) âThere is nothing controvertial or âdebate worthyâ about this issueâ
b) " Blue is the only choice that introduces ANY sort of risk in the whole issue. Therefore choosing blue is, in fact, the risky choice."
To dispel any misundestanding, anyone regardless of mental clarity or mental/cognitive ability or qualifications can be swindled or tricked by a carefully constructed question/dilemma/puzzle. Indeed there are good/bad and smart/silly reasons to choose either blue of red, therefore you cannot reasonably make any useful judgements based of the choice someone made on the poll.
Both choices are fine with me.
All I am saying is that Blue is the only one that introduces risk/gambling.
On the contrary, my analogy is revealing that Blue is the only one that introduces collective risk/danger.
Maybe you missed it because I made the post while you were writing this one, but what would you vote here:
Are you still voting blue? 
Not at all. Red created no risk for those people.
They chose Blue themselves and willingly put themselves at risk.
Asking for other people to partake in someoneâs elses gambling and partake to someone elseâs willing choice of risk, only for the benefit of those other people is not only illogical, but borderline unethical.
If they want to do so, fine.
Asking it of them, and peer-pressuring them to do so, is not fine.
I know that those kind of ideas are in vogue currently, but that doesnât make them reasonable.
That is a veeeeery big if, in real life. 
Remember, this is a hypothetical question that could never really happen to anyone that is voting. There is plenty of leeway to be very casual about what you would choose.
Have you ever played Texas Holdâem with chips, but no money?
Everyone goes âall inâ with every pair, even 7-2 which is the worst in the game.
Try to introduce blinds even as small as 0.01 and 0.02 and a âbuy-inâ of 2 euros and suddenly everyone turns pro and get sunglasses and declare âpassâ even by holding relatively good hands.
If the choice was to be made for real and people had to put their actual lives in danger, the percentages would have been very different.
Just the uncertainty of what you said (the âif enough people alignâ) would be enough to turn a lot of people to voting red. What if they donât? Would you risk it? Would you gamble your life when the other choice offers safety without any moral issues (since, as I said, the people that choose Blue, choose the risk themselves)? Would you really?
The whole issue is that you fail to understand that since there is no âcoordinationâ, then every person can only deal with what its own vote can or cannot do.
One choice has a definitive outcome and it can be measured.
The other choice is a gamble and you have pray that 50+% of other people took the same gamble as you did, for no exact/apparent reason.
Iâd say my opinion is:
âI can press whatever I like and other people can press whatever they like. I do not judge whether people want to gamble their lives or not, thatâs their choice.â
Good point.
Easily solved though, in reality.
Since I cannot help them to decide to press red, if we suppose that they got confused and they are just winging it, I can assume that there is a 50% chance of them hitting red or blue. Right?
So, there are two outcomes:
a) if they choose red, they are safe. It doesnât matter what I choose.
b) if they choose blue, they are dead (because, as I said, with real stakes on the table, there is no way blue is hitting 50+%). It doesnât matter what I choose.
So, in either case, my choice doesnât matter to the survival of my family.
I had some very intense and honest IRL discussions about this topic and I believe I figured it out. The core difference between red buttoners and blue buttoners seems to be the amount of value they subconsciously assign to a random unknown personâs life.
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I added additional information to the poll.
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I think that your perspective is valid, however it does assume a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity. I think it ultimately depends on what you think is more plausible to achieve:
- Convincing over 50% of everyone to press blue to save everyone.
- Ensuring that 100% of the people that you care about press red.
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This problem definitely falls under the umbrella of a coordination game, as you can read in the wiki page, there is definitely no need for communication in order for a problem to be considered as a âcoordination problemâ. Yours is basically an appeal to authority, even if a dictionary agrees with you, definitions in game theory are structural rather than linguistic. âCoordination problemâ is not about whether coordination is possible but whether it is required for optimal outcome.
This is also wrong and you see applications of that on the daily, when you pick a lane in traffic do you communicate with other drivers? you donât, yet that is a coordination problem (you wonât stay in the same line where traffic is heavy).
I will give you that you didnât say those words exactly, but this quote comes pretty close imo:
If you think thatâs fundamentally different from what I understood, kindly explain to me how.
You keep framing blue as the option that introduces risk, but that only holds if you look at it in isolation. The risk to blue voters only materializes if enough people choose red. If everyone chose blue, there would be no risk at all. The risk isnât created by blue alone but rather emerges from the interaction between choices. Red is what makes that risk materialize at the collective level.
You keep framing it in a way that hides the collective structure, you say âdo you want to gamble with your life?â
But actually it looks like:
blue = conditional collective success
red =individual guarantee + risk shifted to others
the way you constantly reframe and reword the problem removes the collective upside. But the original problem isnât asking if you want to gamble with your life, there is more nuance to that then you make it out to.
That would only be true if the risk were independent, but it isnât. blue isnât like taking a personal gamble in isolation. The outcome depends on how many people choose each option.
Blue only becomes dangerous if enough people choose red, so it is not accurate to say that blue voters are solely responsible for the risk they face, since the risk arises from the interaction of everyones choices. Red may be individually safe but it still contributes to the conditions under which blueâs risk materializes.
Your responses are rethorically fine but logically flawed. Saying âpeople wonât coordinate, so choose redâ doesnât resolve the problem, it just assumes its failure.
The whole point is that blue is the only outcome where everyone survives, but it requires alignment under uncertainty. Red avoids that uncertainty individually, but only by making a worse outcome more likely if enough people think the same way.
This is your core mistake. You keep equating âno coordinationâ with âonly individual effects matterâ but in this setup the effect of your vote is defined by the collective outcome. So even without coordination, your decision is still shaped by your expectations of others behavior. For example if you knew for a fact that exactly 50% voted blue and 50% red and you were the deciding vote, would you still choose red and condemn all the blue voters?
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Of course, if you know in advance how many will press blue, your choice is easy. Ultimately itâs a bet. People who press blue bet that the majority will do the same.
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