Computer scientist, applied mathematician. Based in the eastern part of England.
Fan of control theory in general and Perceptual Control Theory in particular. Everyone should know about these, whatever subsequent attitude to them they might reach. These, plus consciousness of abstraction dissolve a great many confusions.
I wrote the Insanity Wolf Sanity Test. There it is, work out for yourself what it means.
Change ringer since 2022. It teaches learning and grasping abstract patterns, memory, thinking with your body, thinking on your feet, fixing problems and moving on, always looking to the future and letting both the errors and successes of the past go.
I first found an LLM useful (other than for answering the question “let’s see how well the dog can walk on its hind legs”) in September 2025. As yet they do not form a regular part of anything I do.
Apologies in advance for not addressing your analysis of the whole family of variations, but only speaking about the original.
Staunch Red here, and have been since first learning of the puzzle.
Framing is irrelevant. Isomorphic puzzles have isomorphic answers. If someone’s answer is changed by the framing, they are not thinking properly. If they notice that they are swayed by the framing, that is their chance to become stronger. As you are doing by analysing all those variations, but I can’t face going through them all, because formalising the problem requires some sort of reflexive decision theory, which is an unsolved problem. There is no way to define a probability distribution of button-presses, because people’s decisions can depend on the distribution they anticipate.
It never was.
But since people do appear to be influenced by the framing, here’s another. But first, I want to go to a place where you change the problem:
No. Let’s not exclude the part where children are choosing as well. It’s a crucial part of the problem for some others, who justify blue by saying, “but think of the children (and the feeble-minded, etc.), the poor children who will just press blue by chance, think of all the children, you must want them to die if you don’t press blue, what sort of monster are you, die scum etc. cont. p.94”.
How are the children going to make that choice? Not in a vacuum. Their parents will advise them, or tell them which button to press, or press it for them. That is one of the duties of parents, guiding their children through the hazards of early life.
You want everyone to press blue and in this article you are trying to persuade them to (despite refraining-not-refraining from giving your own attitudes, in footnote 9). Therefore that is what you will be telling your own children or making them do. You will be risking their lives in order to get the virtuous thrill of saving their lives.
Would you urge your children to run into the traffic, so as to pull them back at the last moment? Push them out of a high window, to catch them just as they begin to plummet?
The virtuous thrill is trash. Look at the real outcomes, not the feels. Before: everyone is alive. After: everyone is alive. Nothing positive is achieved in the end, any more than from a chain letter. A chain letter of virtue signalling.
As Insanity Wolf might put it:
HAS CURE FOR DISEASE
SPREADS DISEASE TO CURE
WANTS TO FIGHT OPPRESSION
CREATES OPPRESSION TO FIGHT
WANTS TO SAVE THE CHILDREN
JAMS A BLENDER WITH THEM