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Comment by bennettnate5 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.

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One button means you almost certainly contributed to homicide, since the odds of everyone pressing red is essentially 0%.

The other one does not contribute to homicide.

The right answer, by the way, is to not press either button. "The only winning move is not to play."

Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:

There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.

You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.

I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved

You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.

I have no idea what that scenario means. How does the buoyancy work? How did it not capsize when there was no one on it? You're loading people above the waterline, to be on/off in a minute, so that makes it more likely to capsize, not less. How come the people off the ship can't help the people in the water? And so on, and so on.

If a rigid airship is being blown about, and might be unmoored, a trained ground crew will jump on the lines because with enough weight they can save the ship and its crew. If too few grab a line, it will unmoor. If you are on the ground crew, and you let go of the line because you are worried about your own life, are you complicit in the deaths caused by the ensuing airship crash?

"Homicide" requires direct causation. The entire concept of "contributed to homicide" is incoherent.

One button could kill you — if and only if enough people press the other button.

The other button certainly won’t kill you, but will kill everyone who pressed the first button — if and only if enough people besides you press it.

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