You’ve Fallen for the Red/Blue Button Trap

The red button vs. blue button debate has been living in my mind rent free for like a month and a half now. While it’s largely left public consciousness already in the age of short-form brain rot, I’ve come to reignite the discussion. Or, more accurately, this has just been sitting in my backlog for a few weeks. Writing is like that sometimes.

Table of Contents

• Red = Bad; Blue = Good
• It Doesn’t Matter What Button You Pick
• You Didn’t Fall Out of a Coconut Tree
• But, Don’t Take My Word for It
• What’s the Point?

Red = Bad; Blue = Good

You might know that I recently wrote a piece titled, Thoughts on the Red Button vs. Blue Button Debate. If you click it now, you’ll be disappointed to find that it’s sitting behind a paywall. That’s because it’s basically the ramblings of a madman. I spent so much of that article trying to add nuance and complexity to a discussion that poses a simple question: do you press red or blue?

For context, the actual question reads: “In front of you appears red and blue button. If more than 50% of the people presses the red button, everybody who pressed the blue button dies. If more than 50% of the people presses the blue button, nobody dies. What button will you press?”

The more time I’ve had to think about it and the more I’ve debated the topic with others, I’ve decided that we’re all missing the forest for the trees. This entire debate has made us fall for the same trap: the idea that an individual’s choices are reflective of their character.

You see it all the time; everyone has turned to tribalism. If you talk to anyone about it, almost certainly they’re going to want to know what button you’d press. For them, it’s not because they want to unpack your answer. It’s because they want to find out if you’re on the same team.

As a result, the debate has largely devolved into: only idiots pick blue and only sociopaths pick red. See, there is a subset of people who select red that genuinely believe that anyone who picks blue is suicidal or has “suicidal empathy.” In contrast, there is a subset of people who select blue that genuinely believe that anyone who picks red is evil.

By clicking on this article, I’m going to assume you’ve fallen for this trap. I’m going to assume that you have made up your mind on a button, and that you have strong beliefs about the character of the other side. In this article, I’m not going to ask you to question your own beliefs. However, I am going to ask you to consider a new possibility: it doesn’t matter what button you pick.

It Doesn’t Matter What Button You Pick

Personally, I don’t think it matters what button you pick. I don’t think it says anything about your character. However, I do think your behavior in this debate does.

To start, I want to briefly comment on the behavior of folks on the red side. I find their behavior a bit more direct. After all, some of them will literally say that anyone who selects blue deserves to die. There’s not really much to dissect here. There’s just a cohort of these folks making Social Darwinism arguments and ascribing anyone who would pick blue as suicidal idiots. I don’t find this particularly interesting, just abhorrent.

Meanwhile, consider the blue side. They argue that blue is the correct button to choose for a variety of reasons:

• It’s easier to achieve 50% + 1 consensus than 100% consensus.
• It’s imperative that you protect innocent folks (i.e., infants, etc.) who also choose blue.
• Choosing red is choosing murder.

I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with any of these arguments. However, I do see one glaring issue. I’ve noticed a trend in folks who select blue. Because it’s believed to be the morally superior choice, they’re seemingly allowed to mistreat the other side. It could be as simple as labeling red button pushers as bad people or sociopaths. Or, it could be much more dangerous. After all, I’ve seen plenty of blue button pushers argue that we should be able to see who picked red. To what end, I wonder.

See, if there was ever a group of truly enlightened folks in the debate, it would be the people who select a color but do not judge the other side. It’s these folks that likely understand that an individual’s choice is not reflective of their character but rather their social conditioning. The outcome of the “game” has nothing to do with individual votes and everything to do with the environment leading up to the vote.

You Didn’t Fall Out of a Coconut Tree

In the horrible run up to the 2024 presidency race, a clip of presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was doing the rounds where she quoted her mother saying: “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” While I don’t care for Harris, I like what she went on to say about her mother’s quote because it captures my issue with the entire red/blue button debate: “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

The assumption from the debate is that the buttons are presented in a vacuum. Therefore, whatever decision you make is purely reflective of you. Obviously, I don’t buy that logic: you weren’t forced out of a coconut tree in front of a pair of buttons.

Most likely, you were ripped out of whatever you were doing in your day-to-day life. Maybe, you were just playing with your kids. Maybe, you were on your commute from work. Maybe, you were studying for a test. Maybe, you were sleeping. Then, suddenly, you spawned into that booth with a choice to make.

Do you honestly think the choice a person makes under these circumstances is reflective of their character? I’m telling you right now: if I get pulled into this dilemma at three in the morning, I’m hitting red and going back to bed.

And, that’s just the immediate context of the decision. Our lives are a culmination of random interactions with our environment. Our choice of button is more reflective of our environment than each of us individually. The zip code you were born in probably reflects your choice of button more accurately than the choice reflects you.

To me, this is so obvious. Maybe all the time I’ve spent in the social sciences and leftist circles has rotted my brain, but in the nature vs. nurture debate, I stake like 95% of my principles on nurture. We are almost entirely a product of our environment. Hell, even our genes are a product of our environment.

Therefore, every time I see the “I’d choose blue because I’d hate to live in a world of people who chose red” take, my head explodes a little. What makes you different from them? Seriously.

But, Don’t Take My Word for It

Having reflected on this question quite a bit in the last week or so, I was pleasantly surprised when my entire argument was made for me at the end of the following Miniminuteman video:

Obviously, if you have the time, you should watch the video. That said, Milo rounds out the final act of the video with really nice reflective point:

You know, when I finished filming that clip, I was like, oh, I’m pretty exhausted. I’ll find a way to summarize all this when I get back into the studio. And then, I got back into the studio, pictured here, and I was like, what the fuck more is there to say about this?

This is exactly how I feel about the whole red/blue button debate. Every argument that could possibly be presented has been beaten to death in the span of a week. I hear people in real life parroting the same talking points I’ve seen in endless Reddit threads. What the fuck is the point?

To me, there is no value in trying to assess someone’s moral character based on a button press in a hypothetical. In fact, I find this entire debate deeply disturbing because it’s missing the forest for the trees. Not only are we talking about using a single data point to extrapolate an almost endless list of effects, but we’re doing so in a way that is basically a eugenicist’s wet dream.

Milo makes pretty much this exact argument at the end of his video too:

Like, this whole Antarctica pyramid is just so fucking stupid on so many levels that, like, I don’t even know if it was deserving of this much time. It just really concerns me that people are able to, like, really believe this. And it’s a great example of something I’ve mentioned in other videos before of how many conspiracies just go back to people not understanding geology. Which is weird because there’s not like that many like “geology conspiracy theories,” but because so many conspiracies hinge on something “looking” like something else, often times it’s a natural feature formed through geology that people don’t understand, and it leads to all kinds of bullshit. Not understanding geology leads to this pyramid thing. The Bear Lodge being a giant tree stump thing. Hell, even the Grand Canyon being used as evidence of the Great Flood from the Bible is just another example of people not understanding geology.

But as always, I think it’s important for all of us to try and temper ourselves a little bit. Because while this is a very stupid theory, I don’t want to directly call the people who are falling for it stupid. I think for the most part everyone has pretty much the exact same potential, and for us to say that there’s going to just be inherently stupid people opens the door for some pretty terrible ways of thinking. Really what we’re looking at is not stupid people. It is people that have been made stupid. People that have been subject to a terrible education system and heavily propagandized.

Apologies for the wall of text, but I wanted to lay the quote out as-is. It could probably best be summarized by Milo himself, who later states:

If I was just born in the same position you were, I would probably be thinkin the same fucking shit.

That really is all there is to it, isn’t it? Imagine what button you might choose under different conditions.

What’s the Point?

I think a lot of folks have tried to find meaning in the red/blue button debate. Even if we aren’t trying to purity test our friends and family, we’ve certainly thought about what it means to be on a particular team. For instance, I’ve seen people try to map the choice to some pair of “opposing” categories:

• individualism vs. collectivism
• rational vs. moral
• low trust vs. high trust
• realist vs. idealist
• republicans vs. democrats.

By now, it’s probably obvious what I think about these attempts to label the buttons: it’s all so, so stupid. However, I think it could be interesting to entertain at least one of the pairings.

Let’s assume red is a vote for a republican candidate and blue is a vote for a democratic candidate. Feel free to walk through this with a variety of real world political races (e.g., Trump vs. Harris, Trump vs. Biden, Trump vs. Clinton).

As a voter of either side, what is your immediate instinct when your candidate loses? Do you blame the people that stayed home? How about the third-party voters? What about the people who voted for the other side?

To me, what we see after every election is the same thing we see in the red/blue button debate: voter shaming. Rather than directing our anger at the system (e.g., our party establishment and the deity or alien that put together the button experiment), we opt to attack each other. Rather than using our energy to organize our communities (e.g., around a candidate or a choice of button), we opt to attack each other.

Therefore, in the button debate, the question shouldn’t be: “which do you choose?” It should be: “how do we create a society where the blue button is the obvious choice?”

With that said, I know someone inevitably is going to sneak in here with some snarky remark like: well, can we not criticize people (e.g., voters) then? After all, even if people are shaped by their environments, do they not have agency?

Of course, I believe people have agency, and you’re welcome to make fun of people who continue to vote against their best interests. I’m not going to stop you from having a good time. I just don’t see the strategic value in voter shaming. We’re never going to win anyone over with it.

And speaking of having a good time, I realize that the average person doesn’t actually care about this button debate at all or any of my “deeper” discussion around it. It’s just another fun hypothetical to pass the time. In fact, against my better judgment, I want to share my button choice to reignite the debate. It’s calling to me like the Green Goblin mask.

The problem is the button question itself is so poorly defined that any quip I could leave here would be hit with like over 9,000 irrelevant rebuttals. Like, people just select whichever assumptions benefit their argument (e.g., everyone must participate, everyone is a rational actor, etc.). So, I guess you’ll just have to read the original piece.

Or if you’re prefer, you can check out some of these other pieces that I found fun and thought-provoking:

• Why I Rebel Against the Use of Generative AI
• Conspiracy Theory: All Pro Sports Are Rigged Now
• Theseus’s PC: Eight Years of Changes to One Man’s Machine

Likewise, in order to read the original piece, you’ll need to check out my list of ways to grow the site. There, you’ll find a link to my Patreon, among other things. Otherwise, take care!