The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising Answer

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]I'm Briggs, statistician to the stars, and today I'm going to bring you a sort of logic puzzle, or it seems to be a logic puzzle at first, that's been making a lot of people crazy. It makes the rounds every now and then, but lately it's been making the rounds again. And I want to talk about the why it does so, and I want to talk about why what I think is the proper or correct solution according to the premises I'm going to give you, according to the logic I'm going to lay out. This is the red blue button dilemma. Let me read you the exact words here.

[00:00:33]I should have this stuff written down, but I don't. Everyone in the world Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button.

[00:00:44]If more than 50% press the blue button, everyone survives.

[00:00:51]If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who press the red button survive.

[00:00:59]Which button would you press?

[00:01:02]Uh Let me give you an equivalent to that. I think the wording of that is the wording of that is a little difficult perhaps for some.

[00:01:11]You can get confused about 50% of blue or red or something like this. Let me read it to you again. Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. Okay, we got that. If more than 50% of the people press the blue button, everyone survives. That's the same. Now, let's put it phrase it in a positive way. If more than 50% of the people press the red button, only people who press the red button survive. Which button would you press?

[00:01:37]Well, this this this is the dilemma. So, you want to pause here. Maybe you want to pause here and think about what you'd answer.

[00:01:44]And that's a good thing to do because I'm going to tell you the background of this, but in case some of you are still thinking about it, this has certain similarities to these other sort of philosophical puzzlers that go around like the trolley question. You've seen the trolley question. That's There's In fact, the trolley question is now so famous, there's now it's memeable. There's even a site you can go this meme generator site. I have links to it. And in fact, I have this entire article written up on my site wmbriggs.substack.com wmbriggs.substack.com or wmbriggs.com.

[00:02:21]And you can read the entire article there.

[00:02:24]And I have the trolley question linked to the meme generator for the trolley question. The trolley question is there's this trolley tunneling down the tracks and it's going to run over any number of people, some large number of people, unless you pull a track switching lever or something like this, which will redirect the trolley onto a different track, which it'll kill fewer number of people. So, what do you do? Well, it's fun to think about these things.

[00:02:52]There's absolutely no sense getting angry about them. But of course, many people do get angry, and that's why I'm bringing you the red blue button dilemma here because it invoked a fury on a lot of people's parts. You know, there's never going to be a situation in which you This is our point here. If we had a real situation in which you had to really divert a track or something like this, you wouldn't even probably know which lever to press. And it doesn't make any sense if you'd have enough time to even figure out which lever you'd have to to press, to pull, or whatever you're going to do to save these people or perhaps kill others to kill a few that many may live or something like this. Well, all that kind of It's fun, right? You can think about all these kind of things. There's now endless variants on these things.

[00:03:39]And the reason that it doesn't have an immediate solution, the trolley problem, is because it contains any number of these tacit or hidden or implicit premises, whatever you want to say. We bring a lot of tacit premises to problems. And in fact, I'm going to show you a particular one right here. This is uh And if you can't If you can't see it or don't understand it, you don't have to understand this math per se, but it this particular problem, if you follow the class, I offer this class on logic and probability and the philosophy of probability and the philosophy of science modeling and so forth, science models and and so on.

[00:04:16]Here, just look for the class that I have. And all of these things have hidden or tacit or implicit premises, and we need to figure out what's going on. So, for instance, I can have a limit problem for those who understand calculus. I can have a limit of X going to eight of one over X minus eight. Well, the limit goes to this thing, right? You see this thing before, this this symbol before. And the joke was, I suppose it's a joke, this this same thing was given to a student, and it now said the limit of X approaching five of one over X minus five, and the kid wrote a five on its side. The first one was an eight on its side, and the second one is a five on its side. And that of course is the right answer. It is a right answer. It's not the answer the the teacher was looking for like this. I gave I gave an entire demonstration of these kinds of puzzles. For instance, what's the next number in this sequence? What's the next number in this sequence? I'm going to give it to you. One, two, three, four, five. Now, what's the next number in that sequence? This is an IQ test.

[00:05:31]Well, many will say some other weird number, strange number, perhaps six or something mistaken like that. The actual number is seven. And it has to do with functions of powers of primes and so forth, which was what I had on my mind.

[00:05:45]So, even the point to that is, and I'll do a whole separate I did a whole lecture on that, but I don't think I did a video on that. I did a write-up on that. I have the link to it. The point is even IQ questions always have implicit premises, tacit premises, premises that you have to look into and see. Not only are you trying to solve a puzzle of logic, you are trying to solve guess the the test maker's mind. You're trying to see what tacit premises he brought to the problem because the the there's a right answer in his mind. But for mathematical sequences, for instance, there are an infinite number of solutions that can fit almost any mathematical sequence. And the same thing with models of data. There's always infinite numbers of models that will fit any given set of data to whatever arbitrary precision you like.

[00:06:35]So, how do you pick the right one? So, that's a difficulty. So, tacit premises they're always there even in these problems here. And they're in the red blue button, too.

[00:06:44]So, let's let's look at this more uh more Let's break it down. Let's break it down here. I'll try to break it down and see if I can find myself here. Here are only There's only four possibilities. There's only four possibilities of the red blue button dilemma. You press red.

[00:07:04]All right, you press red, and the majority presses blue.

[00:07:09]You press red, the majority presses blue, you live, and so does everybody else because the majority presses blue. That's one of our premises. Okay? Now, number two. Number two. Not number two, number two.

[00:07:25]Uh you press red, and the majority presses red. Well, again, you live.

[00:07:31]But unfortunately, those who pressed blue in the minority, they're killed by whatever.

[00:07:37]And that's something we need to think about for a second here, too. You press blue. This is the option number three.

[00:07:44]I forgot how they did it in the movie.

[00:07:45]Three.

[00:07:46]Uh You press blue, the majority presses blue, everybody lives. Okay? Option four.

[00:07:55]You press blue, and the majority presses red. Well, then you die.

[00:08:00]Uh and that's a that's a premise we have here.

[00:08:04]We have That's the rules. That's the rules right there. Now, what's the best thing to do? Aha, the It doesn't say.

[00:08:11]The question doesn't say what's the best thing to do. It doesn't define best. It just asks you what you would do. There's no information in the question itself that we can see that tells us what's the good or proper thing to do. And this is where a lot of people blew up right here. This is where they they they got mad because there's at least two other premises in there. With important ones that I'll come to in a second, but there's a lot more.

[00:08:34]The the first one the the problem set up said everybody has a private vote.

[00:08:39]Everybody? Children? Infants? The unconscious? NPR listeners? I mean, who is everyone?

[00:08:46]It's not quite specified, too. And who's doing the killing?

[00:08:51]And why are they doing the killing? Are they going to kill right away? Is it going to be slow and torturous? Or does everybody else just get to live forever, and everybody else lives out their natural lives? There's all kind of things that are not in there. And there's absolutely no definition of the good. What is the good? What is the proper thing to do? And to get to that, we have at least two other premises. The other minds premise.

[00:09:14]And the other lives value premise. And this is where a lot of people just went nuts. The people especially who select blue.

[00:09:23]And advocate other people select blue. Let me read you one quote. Very typical, very typical quote. Red is an unbelievably, phenomenally, disgustingly selfish decision.

[00:09:37]And I do not have a theory of mind for anyone who would choose it. Theory of mind. Here's our other minds premise.

[00:09:44]Another guy says the red people who should be taken out and mock hanged.

[00:09:49]Now, he says they should be taken out and mock hanged now, and of course, he means a lot more than that. They should be punished in some way. The red red people A lot of people are are for the red people receiving any punishment even up until uh including death.

[00:10:03]So, they want to save humanity.

[00:10:06]These people want to save humanity. They want to save man, the species, but they're not so interested in men.

[00:10:13]They're revealing both their other minds premise. The first person said he cannot uh even define anybody who has a uh wants to select red, but he's lying, of course. He otherwise he wouldn't have said uh they were being selfish. So, we have we have other minds. We need to think about what other minds are doing, and this is what a lot of people did not do.

[00:10:33]And then we need to think about other lives values, okay? So, these people these people absolutely uh You got to think. So, let let's let let's think about this. So, if they're going to press blue, uh someone wants to press blue. Now, we also had that premise in there. We had that premise in there. Everybody's going to take a private vote. And people reveal in this, if you look at it and think about it enough, that they know there's going to be a vote. The vote will eventually be private, but it seems like everybody except there's going to be some period of time between being informed of this and going and taking the vote. However, this is going to happen. This magical thing is going to happen.

[00:11:14]And so, we have a point at which a point of time at which we can advocate other people uh advocate to other people the reasoning for our choice. And it's difficult to to think about these things. There There's also another set of people. There's another set of people out there. There's some people who just want to take red, and they're not uh happy with the blue people. They want to live no matter what, and this is their their premise. Uh and and of course, no matter what if you press red, we already saw in the four situations, no matter what you live.

[00:11:43]But, there's others people out there who are not quite so uh mean-spirited about this whole thing, and not quite so angry. And that's uh there's a lot of women who just want to be nice, and then they're very altruistic about this. It sounds like the nice option. Oh, let's all press blue, and then everybody lives. And that sounds very good. That sounds very good. But, they're not necessarily thinking it through.

[00:12:02]They're not thinking through all of the consequences of other minds and other lives values. The other lives values is they hold the other lives values very high. These these ladies do. But, they're not necessarily thinking about other minds, all right? Or they're putting other people's minds the same thinking about their that they have, and they're assuming everybody else has that. So, we need to we need to walk through this.

[00:12:25]So, let's think about this. You want to press blue. You want to press blue. Now, uh So, >> [sighs] >> you must have in your and the reason you're doing so is cuz you value man. You not necessarily men, but you you value humanity. You want to save humanity and do good for humanity and so forth. But, you must realize, of course, that there are other people out there who are going to press red.

[00:12:50]How many of them?

[00:12:52]So, you must have a guess in your mind that uh there's going to be some number of people pressing red. And you might even give a decent chance to that there's going to be enough people out there who are reasoning uh unlike you because you want to press blue, who are going to press red, maybe even a majority of people. And in which case, you're going to die because that's the the rules of this thing. If you press blue, you could still do so in a kind of a protest vote. And if you really do believe enough people are selfish like you're saying, uh and then another people will press red, and then uh the majority will press red, and then you're going to die. So, your death will show them that you were a really good person.

[00:13:32]And there are people who could reason like that. And then of course, there's those ladies out there who are thinking very nice thoughts about other people, and they really are being altruistic and so forth. And can't everybody get along?

[00:13:42]And uh and that's as pretty much as far as they go with those kind of thoughts.

[00:13:47]But, think about red now. Let's think about the the selfish up I don't think the selfish option holds up for the people who want to press red.

[00:13:56]I cannot care about humanity. I cannot care about man. I can only care about men.

[00:14:01]I have people close to me. I have my wife whom I love and I want to save. I have uh my sons whom I want to save, and their sons whom I want to save. I will advocate they press red and insist that they press red to save their lives.

[00:14:18]Uh not necessarily because I'm not selfish for myself, but because I want them to live. And I think a a lot of other people reason along the same lines. I care about those close to me. I don't care about this amorphous band of people I've never met and I can't know.

[00:14:33]Cuz think about this, there's only two commandments, right? If you're if you're Christian, there's love God and short love God and love your neighbor like yourself. Your neighbor are those close to you. These are the people I would advocate to press red.

[00:14:46]Now, I have other minds premise, too. I think some people will press blue. I think some of these people will be these nice ladies, and I think I'm going to feel sorry for them, but I would think be nice if they had a man over them saying, you know, look, here's the situation. Here's why I want you to press red.

[00:15:02]But, that's not quite the whole of it.

[00:15:04]The whole of it for me is I think most of these people who especially the louder they scream about how they're going to press blue, the louder and more adamant they are about blue, I think in private they're going to press red.

[00:15:16]In fact, I am morally certain that a lot of them are lying. They're lying for purely performative reasons. And that after if this thing God forbid ever happens and we all are given this dilemma to press buttons, afterwards those people who were the loudest blue supporters will come out and say, well, my button must have malfunctioned or or I swear I did press blue and it just didn't work or somehow I was spared.

[00:15:41]>> [laughter] >> They'll come up with any number of reasons why they really did press blue, but didn't, and they pressed red instead. Or they'll say, I just agreed that everybody else was going to be so selfish that I had to be selfish, too.

[00:15:53]So, there's a lot of uh there's a lot of blowhard uh blowhardedness, I guess, if you if you like about this whole thing. And people are not being entirely honest about what they would do in private. I am morally certain that the majority would press red.

[00:16:09]And therefore, I'm going to press red for those reasons. Because my other minds are that I know what I think I'm really really morally certain that a lot of these blue people are lying. Some of the blue people are nice.

[00:16:23]Uh like the ladies I talked about, but I'm hoping that they can find someone to explain these rules to them more clearly. And the other lives premise that I have, unlike theirs, is I value the people close to me. I want to save their lives. I don't and can't care about everybody. It's an impossibility.

[00:16:40]I can only save me and my own. And that's the red button red blue button dilemma. I hope you enjoyed this, and uh press red if ever offered the opportunity. Thanks for listening. Oh, wmbriggs.substack.com for the whole write-up.