Mathematician vs Red vs Blue Button

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only the people who press the red button survive. Which button would you press? This problem was reposted by none other than Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast donated $1.99 through Super Chat. Big Black Monkey Boy Big Mr. Beast This is one of those questions which looks like a moral dilemma, but the real answer is hidden in game theory. Because once you strip away the emotion, the math behind it is brutal. If you pick the blue button, then there's a chance that the majority also pick the blue button and everyone lives. But there's also a chance that the majority picked red and you literally die along with everybody else who picked blue. But if you pick the red button, then there's a chance that the majority pick blue and everyone lives anyway, but there's also a chance that the majority pick red and people die, just not you. But if you pick the red button, then there's a chance that the majority picks blue and everyone lives anyways, but there's also a chance that a large minority pick blue and a majority pick red and that large minority all die, just not you. So both options are essentially the same, only the red one is the only one that can guarantee life and the blue one can't guarantee anything. So from a purely individualistic rational perspective, the red button is the only one that makes sense. But if everybody thinks that way, then the majority will pick red and so people will end up dying. But if everyone chooses red, then everyone survives anyway. And this is called a Nash equilibrium where everyone has picked a strategy and no one person can do better by changing just their own choice, so everyone sticks with what they're doing. But even though the math says red is optimal, before you all start red maxing, some world-class philosophers have said the opposite. The real choice, hold on, is blue. Some people are going to be blind.

[00:01:57]Some people are not going to have the limbs to click it. Some people are going to be color blinds. It that's just not good.

[00:02:07]All we need is at least 50% of people to press the blue button and that creates something called the Pareto best result where no one is worse off and everyone is maximally better off. But here's the catch, that only works if everybody trusts each other enough to trust that the majority of people will also pick blue. So the puzzle isn't really about which button to press, it's about whether humanity can coordinate on a risk when each individual has an incentive to rebel. Red is logical at the individual level but blue represents something deeper. Connection, trust, humanity, love. So the answer depends on what question you're really asking. What is the rational game theoretical option to pick? It's obviously red. What is the button that makes the best world possible where nobody dies because they were disabled or stupid or a child? The answer is obviously blue. At the end of the day if this was to actually happen, if Mr. Beast was to encage the Earth and claim ownership of all of us as his subjects and was to perform this social experiment on us just for entertainment purposes, then we should pick whatever the majority go with and if that majority goes with blue then we should pick blue to save all of the babies, the people who can't make the correct decision or the people who misclicked or whatever. But if the majority is going to pick red, then the blue button does literally just become the suicide button. But game theory does get a lot deeper than this. So click this video if you want to see the seven levels of game theory. Like, comment, subscribe and piss off.

[00:03:43]Um yeah, baby.