If you think most farmers, construction workers, factory workers, and so on would press blue then you might want to actually get to know some of them and put them to this test. I don’t think many of them would willingly risk death on something so trivial as a button press. I’ve seen guys get rescued from falling off roofs but as written I don’t think many of the guys running to get their buddy out of his harness and on the ground are going to pick blue if you present it in a really clinical sense.
Sure, I can ask around. It's a drought here, so we're looking for things to talk about.
It's not really about the numbers, though, is it? The red button future is now a mix of game theoreticians, Objectivists, and people who like the color red. The proportion of parasites is up.
I thought about the ternary choice. Unconscious people, conscientious objectors, etc. The wording is that blue needs to exceed 50%, so the doomsday machine defaults to red.
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
I don’t think short order cooks are know for being that especially emphatic. Along with most of the folks who “do stuff”—build roads, maintain power lines, etc.
There's actually many scientific studies which tend to show that empathy is inversely correlated with wealth. That's popular knowledge as old as class war, but it seems there may be scientific evidence to support that.
edit: specified who
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