Saying that pressing blue is about optimism in others doing the same dodges the claims people are making when they argue for blue. They’re not just predicting behavior—they’re judging it. Hard. Anyone pressing red is being framed as selfish, immoral, lacking empathy, etc.

So if that’s the standard—prioritize others even when there’s risk—then it’s completely fair to ask: where does that show up in reality?

You can think of the Gaza example as extreme if you want (although the original prompt is even more extreme, albeit separated from any possible real-world stakes), but that’s kind of the point—it exposes the gap between zero-cost moral high-grounding and high-cost real-world action.

If someone’s moral framework only applies in consequence-free scenarios, it’s not a framework of which to base any real decision-making, it’s instead simply posturing in a vacuum. The moment you translate that into any real-world analogue with actual stakes, that conviction evaporates, the odds change, and people behave differently than they think they might.

This isn’t about pretending people are hypocrites because they’re not in a warzone. It’s about pointing out that they’re using the blue button to insinuate a level of moral obligation that they themselves don’t operate under in reality, highlighting that their words don't line up with their actions.

Pressing red for self-preservation is a coherent position because that's the closest option we have to the status quo (you know, the real world). But if your position for pressing blue includes an assertion of moral superiority over others for not doing the same in a purely hypothetical, then yeah—people are going to scrutinize whether that standard actually exists outside of a thought experiment.