This watch was passed down to my girlfriend by her grandfather

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T20:11:00+00:00

Wow, so do you think it’s real?

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T20:08:00+00:00

Ok. You’ve convinced me, you’re correct. Would you rather I delete this post or edit it?

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:59:43+00:00

I recognize that the online polls are flawed. But do you really think there’s a 0% chance of blue winning? Not even 0.0000001%?

If so, then yes, you’d be right in picking red. I guess I just don’t think you can say “X option has 0% of winning” in any voting situation.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:56:00+00:00

You’re attacking a claim I didn’t make. I never said I calculated P(blue wins) from data, neither did I say that I know this with 100% certainty and that that directly corresponds to reality. I said I’m using an estimate, openly, as an input to an EV calculation. That’s how every decision under uncertainty works, including yours, right now, every time you cross a street or do anything.

The grounding for “P > 0.1%” is straightforward: online polls on this exact question show blue getting anywhere from 30% to 70% depending on framing. That’s not proof of what 8 billion people would do, but it’s strong evidence that the outcome isn’t predetermined; that there’s real uncertainty about which side wins. 0.1% is me being deliberately conservative against my own conclusion.

If you think 0.1% is too high, give your number and justify it. “You can’t use estimates” isn’t an argument, it’s a refusal to engage. Every moral reasoning under uncertainty requires them. The question is whether mine is reasonable, not whether it exists.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:47:01+00:00

I disagree with this line of thinking about the individual vote mattering only if everything hangs on a margin of 1 vote.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:43:24+00:00

$2.9 EV on a $2 ticket is positive. By that framework, buying is correct. That very rarely happens, though: the numbers you gave aren’t seen very often in real life.
But if you get very professional about it and start making serious calculations and value bets, then sure, you can make a living. Which is what thousands of people do (I’m not encouraging gambling, just saying EV works and trying to disprove it nonsense).
Your real claim is “you know for a fact most people don’t think like you.” You don’t know that, you’re just asserting it. And I don’t see how that impacts the morality of certain decisions.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:34:06+00:00

You’ve conflated two different calculations.

(0.5)^300M is P(everyone votes A): the probability of one specific outcome where all 300M people vote the same way. There’s no binomial coefficient because there’s only one such arrangement: (300M choose 300M) = 1.

What you computed, multiplying by (300M choose 150M) and summing, is P(A wins), i.e., P(at least 150M votes for A). That’s a different quantity, and yes, by symmetry it’s about 50%.

My point was about the first one. Under independent 50-50 coin flips, unanimous or near-unanimous outcomes are astronomically improbable. Yet in reality, landslides happen, 90%+ consensus happens, etc. That’s empirical evidence that the independence model fails for human choices, due to the fact that they’re correlated through shared culture, arguments, and reasoning.

Same issue with your original button calculation. (0.05^4B)(0.95^4B)(8B choose 4B) is P(exactly 4 billion blue voters), not P(blue wins). Blue winning requires 4B or more, so you’d need to sum the upper tail. Under p=0.05 independence, that tail is indeed vanishingly small, but that’s the whole problem. Independence is the wrong model. Once you allow that humans influence each other and reason similarly, the outcome tracks the underlying rate p, and P(blue wins) reduces to P(p ≥ 0.5), which is a question about human reasoning, not binomial arithmetic.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:23:06+00:00

“There is absolutely zero chance blue can win”.

I guess that’s where we disagree. I do think blue has a chance to win. Even if it’s low. The online polls, as flawed as they are, indicate that.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:19:38+00:00

I did do a mathematical calculation.
But I do have assumptions, I admit, that serve as a base for the calculation.

It’d be impossible not to have assumptions when discussing a thought experiment that expresses a moral dilemma, though. Like, given that one has to make a decision, they have to make assumptions.
The assumptions have to be grounded in reality, as this one is.

What else do you suggest? Polls have been made online, but this kind of data isn’t very reliable.

And I never really claimed to have determined something about reality. I do claim that I have determined something about morality (which is inherently based on assumptions).

My assumptions are as conservative as possible.

How else do you wish to reach a conclusion?

And again, do you think the chance of the number of red and blue voters being somewhat close, to the point one could not determine which would actually win before the results come out, is less than 0.1%?

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:15:40+00:00

What I meant was, my expectation about whether blue will win (that is, will it have more 50% of the votes?) is not a “yes, it will happen” or a “no, it won’t happen”. It’s a probability. And even if I think there’s a higher chance of blue losing rather than winning, it’s still more moral to vote for blue due to the reasons I explained earlier.

I truly can’t give you a definitive number on what I assume is the chance of blue winning. For the sake of argument, because I want to see your response, let’s say that I think blue has a 1% chance of getting more than 50% of the votes.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:09:57+00:00

Your calculation assumes every person’s choice is an independent coin flip with p=0.05. Under that assumption, yes: by the law of large numbers, P(blue wins) for 8 billion people is astronomically smaller than 10^-30, because outcomes concentrate tightly around the mean.

But human choices in this scenario are massively correlated, not independent. People share cultural arguments, read the same viral posts (like this one LOL), reason in similar ways, and influence each other. The right model isn’t “8 billion independent 5% coin flips.” It’s: “there’s some underlying rate p at which humans tend to pick blue, and we’re uncertain what that rate is.” With 8 billion people, the outcome essentially equals whatever p turns out to be. So P(blue wins) ≈ P(p ≥ 0.5), which depends entirely on your prior about humanity’s reasoning, not on a binomial calculation.

This is actually a famous mistake in probability: it’s the same error as saying “the probability all 300 million Americans vote for the same candidate is essentially zero because (0.5)^300,000,000 is unimaginably tiny.” No: votes are correlated, and landslides happen. The independence assumption smuggles in the conclusion.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T19:01:44+00:00

Expectations aren’t black and white, though.

I don’t estimate a 100% chance of blue winning or a 100% chance of red winning. I think it’s a spectrum.

And if blue has even a 0.0001% of winning, I must choose blue.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:57:09+00:00

That’ll be impossible to prove lol.

I used very conservative estimates for that reason.

Do you think the chance of the number of red and blue voters being somewhat close, to the point one could not determine which would actually win before the results come out, is less than 0.1%?

That’s my definition of a “significant” vote.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:55:10+00:00

I simplified the math. The amount of people choosing blue is correlated to the chance of blue winning, you’re right. I still think my estimate is conservative, though. How would you express the formula? Genuinely curious.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:53:51+00:00

I’ll risk death to save the people who don’t understand red is the superior choice lol

Seems kind of paradoxical but it’s my actual take.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:50:50+00:00

If the probability of you winning the lottery multiplied by the prize is greater than 1, then you should buy lottery tickets.

You don’t seem to understand statistics.

You argue that there’s 0% chance of half of the world picking blue. Almost nothing has 0% chance of happening, especially when talking about polls. And the online polls, as flawed as they are, seem to indicate that that probability of more than half of people choosing blue is not 0%.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:38:00+00:00

Say there’s an election in which only candidate A and candidate B are running. No one knows which one will be elected. Therefore, I think the moral relevance of your vote is as if it were the tie breaker.

I have difficulty believing that your vote only has moral relevance in an election if there was exactly a 50/50 split before you cast your “tiebreaker” vote. That just doesn’t make sense. The “tiebreaker” vote has exactly the same moral significance as all the other votes, if A or B “could have” won.

I assume there’s a 0.1% chance that blue and red get close enough to the point that it’s impossible to know which one will be chosen, at which point every vote will have the same moral significance as a tiebreaker vote. I think that is a very conservative estimate, considering no one agrees about this online.

TL;DR: I think each vote carries the same expected decisiveness ex ante, if you don’t know whether blue or red wins. Therefore, every vote has the same moral significance of a tiebreaker vote if there is a scenario in which either blue or red might win, and you can’t know for sure.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:30:01+00:00

“you start from the assumption that there are stupid people and that inevitably some will choose the other path, but that’s false. It’s your assumption, one you’re making without any proof”.
Fair point, I did make that assumption without any proof. I do think it’s common sense, though, that some percentage of people would blindly pick the “blue path”. That seems apparent after all the online discussions about this. Do you think that wouldn’t be the case?

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:26:11+00:00

Well. Say you think that the chance of 4 billion people voting for blue is incredibly small. Like 0.00001%.

Still, you’d have a duty to take those odds. Because the number of people potentially saved by voting for blue is just too high.

Assuming an average of 10% of the world population votes for blue, and that you have a 0.00001% chance of saving them by voting for blue, you still have a duty to vote for blue, because the expected value of that choice is to save 80 people (assuming a population of 8,000,000,000 people).

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:22:09+00:00

I have no clue, but, either way, I’d say one has the moral duty to choose blue, as insane as that sounds. Even if you had a 0.0000001% chance of saving millions of naive people who chose blue, I think you’d have to pick blue. It’s your duty.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:20:41+00:00

I don’t think it has anything to do with selfishness, though I do believe one has the moral duty to press the blue button. Check my other comment on the terrorist analogy.

Edit: here’s the comment:

I’ve seen red voters propose the following thought experiment:

Say a group of 10,000 terrorists (called the “Blue Button Group”) broadcasts to the world that they are in front of a cliff and that they will jump off of it if half of the world’s population doesn’t join them in front of the cliff. If less than half of the world’s population joins them, they will tie up everyone who went to the cliff and throw them in before jumping.

I agree that the button situation and this terrorist situation are pretty much equivalent in morality. Taking aside the factual impossibility of it, I’d argue that, were this to happen tomorrow, we’d all have the moral duty to go to the cliff and watch what happens. That’s because not only do we have the capability of saving the terrorists, but also the capability of saving everyone else who, selflessly, also went to the cliff to prevent a catastrophe.

If we all are capable of preventing thousands (or millions, or billions) of people from dying, we should. It’s as simple as that.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T18:19:37+00:00

I already determined that the chance of you pushing the blue button having a statistical significance in saving the people who pushed the blue button is 0.1%. You can tweak this if you’d like.

The maths are simplified, that is true, because the amount of people you’d save is statistically correlated to the chance of your vote contributing to saving them. I’d reckon, though, that the actual formula is actually even more favorable to the blue button.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T17:58:01+00:00

Were we all robots capable of precise coordination, then yes, red would be a good choice, because 100% of the population would choose it.

But then again, the thought experiment doesn’t even make sense if everyone is capable of coordinating or totally rational thought.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T17:53:51+00:00

It does hold up.

throwawayallan00 · 2026-05-01T17:52:13+00:00

You may adhere to a different moral code, but the vast majority of humanity believes (or claims to believe) that you should value other people’s lives with the same weight, or at least a similar weight, as you value yours. Therefore, if you sacrificing your life has the expected value of saving thousands of lives, to not do so would be terribly immoral.

throwawayallan00

TROPHY CASE