I've always wanted to write a story in the vein of World Trigger's tactical battles, but the Ranked battles with 3-4 teams of varying personalities and abilities can be pretty difficult to follow with a map and actual pictures. Could someone write a similar premise using only words?
I actually don't have any psychological inputs or mathematical insights to offer to the original dilemma, but I realized something for people who keep abstracting metaphors and equivalent scenarios to explain the dilemma.
There is no equivalent scenario.
My realization came along when someone equated the dilemma to an experiment and asked "Do you want to die? Press blue for yes, red for no. PS, if more than 50% of people want to die, the experiment is cancelled."
And that actually got me thinking, because behind the scenes, it's the exact same software. The exact same algorithm that's running, but the frontend is completely different. And just because the question is posed in a different way, it yielded a different response from me.
The whole "abstracting the dilemma into a different metaphor" actually defeats the purpose of the question. Most people aren't going to stop and abstract the question into a different question.
And that's the brilliance of this dilemma.
The original dilemma simply states "If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone lives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only the people who press the red button survive. Which button do you press?"
And of course, in an effort to take the moral high ground, everyone started immediately creating these "equivalent scenarios", not realizing that changing the question changes the answer, even if the math is 100% identical.
Do I want to die? Does "no" make me a red button pusher?
Do I want to save everyone at the risk of my own life? Does "yes" make me a blue button pusher?
But none of these questions are the original question. It simply lays the facts and asks which button do you press? And any kind of interpretation would fundamentally change the question that is being asked.
So the real dilemma here is: how do you interpret the question? And how do you think everyone else will interpret the question?
Are the red button pressers selfish pricks who only value themselves? Or are they people that don't want to endanger their lives for literally no good reason?
Are the blue button pressers suicidal idiots? Or are they people who are playing a math game in expectation of what everyone else will play it?