Not everyone who thinks there are political implications to this question is American.
People are not claiming that YOU are making an allegorical point, since you are not the original poster of this particular question. I don’t know if he had politics in mind, but it doesn’t matter: the question itself gives no context, so people will interpret it as they see fit.
i got some updates from a local place i shared it at
the world will be much worse anyway if only the red ones survive, because the percentage of narcissists will increase, the number of children will decrease, etc."
If I press red, I guarantee my own life but risk killing others. If I press blue, I do not guarantee my own life but I also do not risk killing others.
My ethics are to minimize harm, so I choose blue.
Also, thanks so much for making this @muffle ! very cool visualization of the thought experiment.
I’m terminally incapable of taking this scenario seriously, much like the trolley problem, but I may have hit upon a solution.
Make propaganda TikToks claiming that pushing the red button will make you gay and autistic and bring in billions of migrants and other nonsense. Persuade everyone else to press red button. If red wins, things will improve. If blue wins, they won’t get worse than they are.
Alternatively, can’t we just smash the machine that’s presumably logging the votes?
ok i made language swticher prettier, rather than using the default sytem one.
Very cool project! I like seeing the different ratios for each country.
I’m sorry people are so insistent on projecting their political interpretations onto it despite you saying you did not intend for it to be a political allegory.
I can’t help but wonder if the results would be any different if the colors had been switched, or even entirely different, like yellow and purple
I personally voted blue. For everyone to survive you would need either 100% red voters or 50% or more blue voters. 100% red voters is entirely unrealistic of an expectation, there will be blue voters (thus death if red is majority), but 50% or more blue is much more realistic, and entirely possible given the current status of your poll
yeah.. maybe i should’ve picked some other colors, but i wanted it to be close to the original question that author made.
i kinda get people, the question itself IS, undeniably at least somewhat political. because it does create an “us vs. them” kind of situation. however, it is not meant to be seen an allegory.
allegory is meant to picture a political meaning, or division. which here can’t be fully applied.
for my understanding an allegory is a symbolic representation with a “hidden” meaning. i don’t think this quite fits the meaning of that word.
there are 100% someone left-leaning picking red, there are some right-leaning people picking blue. centrist can pick whatever they want. like. yes, the question can be interpreted as political, but it shouldn’t be interpreted as an allegory. that’s my only issue tbh.
i definitely think that maybe the color choice itself is fucking me in the ass, but nothing i can do now…
during early development of this (its been changed a bit quite a few times), i myself have voted red. i thought that’s the correct option. however, i’ve since changed my opinion, and i do think blue is the correct choice, but what’s done, is done, i could override data manually, but that wouldn’t be fair, would it now.
You’re missing the point.
Tim Urban, man, I used to read his blog 
, then apparently he wrote a book about how cancel culture and leftism are what’s truly scary about society. Anyway I guess I vote blue.
