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Notes -
To be contrarian for a minute:
100% Red and 100% Blue are indeed identical.
60% Blue is good. Everyone is alive. 60% Red is bad - it means that 40% of the population have just died horribly.
That is, the threshold for a good outcome with Blue is 50%. If Blue gets at least 51% everyone is alive and it's great. But the threshold for a non-horrible outcome with Red is much higher. Even 90% Red is still 10% of the population dying. If you gave this poll to America and the result was 90% Red, that would still be easily the worst thing to happen to America in approximately ever. By comparison: WWII killed approximately 17% of Poles, 14% of Soviets, and 8.8% of Germans. It only killed 0.3% of Americans.
How high do you need the Red percentage to be before you shrug and say, "Oh, well, acceptable casualties"? 80% 90%? 95%?
Is it lower if you think that people who pick Blue are obviously idiots and it's their own fault? Don't like it, should've picked Red? In your estimation, is picking the 'wrong' answer in a poll like this enough to condemn someone to death?
The thing is, you only need to get Blue to 50% to save everyone. That seems like a much lower hurdle than getting Red to 100%.
If you're forcing this choice on me? 55% red. Because if 45% of people are literally too stupid to understand "pick red and live", then whatever I do doesn't matter, because even if I pick blue now and save them, the next minute they're going to wander into traffic or stick their fingers in the electric socket or think they can drink bleach and get away with it. See? I can add on conditions to retrospectively justify my choice and make me turn out to be the Superior Virtuous Gentleperson, too!
But 45% of people are not going to die, because this is an imaginary Internet poll and nobody lives, dies, or gets bunions from picking one colour over another and I refuse to be guilt-tripped. I know the difference between the real world and the imaginary, and the choices I make will be different if it's an actual real person in front of me, versus 'pretend you see a red button and a blue button in front of you'.
...I don't see the point in playing the "it's just a silly internet poll" card so early?
Yes, obviously it's just a silly poll, but if I'm going to engage with the scenario in good faith I'm going to probe my intuitions around questions like "what do I consider acceptable casualties?" or "am I more comfortable with the deaths of millions of people if they can be argued to have brought it on themselves through their own foolishness?" or "to what extent does intelligence or even just a single smart or dumb decision factor into my assessment of the value of human life?" and so on.
That's the whole point of the exercise.
I'm not going to go that level of introspection over a quick'n'dirty Twitter poll. Have a sense of proportion. That's like digging out the Collected Works of Heidegger to help you decide "do you want fries with that?"
A serious question exploring moral and ethical choices? Yes, I'll do the deep thinking. An Internet Quizilla poll? Come on, now.
Why are you responding to comment at all, then?
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