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Thinking about that red button/blue button Twitter post the other day and had kind of a disturbing realization: it essentially convinces people to be antisocial and murderous. There was a bit of dissonance between the two positions that I couldn't articulate, but I have figured it out now. The people who push blue frame their choice as a social one, one made with the outcome for the group in mind. The people who push red, though, frame their choice as an individual one, they're really only pushing the one that guarantees their own safety. Saying something like "Everyone just needs to push red to live," for one thing is coercive and for another isn't a solution or an excuse, it's just attempting to obfuscate personal responsibility. Framing them both as individual choices doesn't really make sense, blues position becomes incoherent because they are knowingly making a social choice. Framing red as a social choice, though? They are voting to kill those who push blue. The original hypothetical phrases this as "People who push the blue button would die," but if people who push the red button made their choice knowing that outcome then it doesn't make sense to phrase it passively, you know what you're voting for. So a lot of people were rather easily convinced that they should murder those who simply don't want to murder anyone.

This is essentially a pro-social vs anti-social game. Personally I think we should be killing those who would kill peaceful people, instead of killing the peaceful people. I was being kind of ironically pro-blue yesterday, but no more irony, I'm dead serious now.

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