Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.

Physician assisted suicide is legal in some places.

There are some people very upset that physician assisted suicide is legal anywhere.

People may pick blue wishing to die. People advocating others to pick blue are either would-be serial killers or would outlaw physician assisted suicide given the chance.

I wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample

The end of the article mentions it. Some people are not purely rational decision makers, some people are altruists who know others are not purely rational, etc.

By choosing red you will kill some people.

Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2)

Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...

(2) https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-true-story-of-the-...

I think most of the people who pick blue would be empathic, loving people that are just kind of bad at game theory.

I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out.

Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.

Yes and yes. Without the core of blue workers, red people will need to open Atlas Shrugged about how to assign short order cook duty.

There will always be someone who chooses blue. Choosing red is choosing to kill them.

There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.

> but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.

Why? To contribute saving the others who chose blue. How isn't that moral?

You're thinking of this like a game where the only point is to "win". That's not how this would actually work in practice.

Blue is the only moral and logical choice. If red gets over 50% and you picked it, therefore contributing to the "red" outcome, you are now effectively a murderer. Plus you now get to live in a world where everyone else alive are sociopaths that picked red, where everyone with a conscience is now dead.

You also can't count on everyone picking red, or "if you picked blue, then you voted for suicide".

It's reasonable to assume that, leading to the button press event, the usual low-trust, "every man by himself" types will rally for red, with the usual excuses, where high-trust societies will make it clear that it's your moral duty to pick blue, to get the votes to the 50% threshold and ensure no one dies. Around the world there would be debates nonstop that would permeate every social circle and families. You'd have huge arguments where the typical selfish types would scream at their family members "how dare you say you're going to press blue, do you want to leave your poor mother alone without their only child?", only pushing red-leaning voters more into red and blue-leaning voters more into blue.

Plus, if you look at the possible outcomes:

- Red wins, you picked red: Depending on where you live, a reasonable portion to the large majority of the population is now dead. The ones alive have, by definition, a strong bias towards individualism and noncooperation. It's extremely likely civilisation will collapse. Pick your favourite fictional dystopia and you might have a reasonable chance of it actually coming somewhat real.

- Red wins, you picked blue: You are now dead, but at least you don't have to live in the world above.

- Blue wins, you picked blue: Things carry on as normal and your conscience is safe in knowing that you didn't vote to kill and that over 50% of your fellow humans also didn't vote to kill.

- Blue wins, you picked red: Things carry on as normal, but you now have a guilty conscience, or, if your vote was made public, people around you know you would have killed them to save your skin.

Crosstabbing the results into a state-by-state table would be interesting.

It is a dilemma because pressing blue or red reveals about your political orientations and your inner empathic responses (i'm assuming both are correlated). Not everyone is wired the same or agrees on politics.

Though in a sense, i agree it's not really a dilemma because only sociopaths pick red in real life. See also intense and spontaneous cooperation in times of crisis (catastrophe, war, etc). See also research on mutual aid as key factor in species development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...

Blue is what gamble? there is no gain associated with choosing blue over red, just pointless risk-taking with only at best a zero outcome.

> red is for people who live in this world and accept it

Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"

GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.

Technically correct, which is the wrong kind of correct. That's an individual framing of a collective problem which fails to capture the social and political ramifications, and all the empathy and solidarity associated with the choice.