Tim Urban, of the popular Wait But Why website broke the internet, and society, this weekend, by posing the most infernal of questions:
It's been worded deliberately this way (he said so afterwards) without further detail, to make it as hard as possible.
And then the internet exploded.
💥
Now, I want to be clear. I don't care one iota whether you're a blue button or a red button person. Seriously. Couldn't give a toss. Because of this:
I love you either way. And I know that you're not choosing.
How you feel about it (and others) is a product of genes that have been propagated over millions of years, in combination with your conditioning and your experience, i.e. all the stuff that's happened on your watch; your past experiences of life, and of death; your current circumstances when asked; the vivid pictures the mind creates when forced to, in this way.
It's like the very purest expression of this, and you simply cannot run from it:
Could this be the best demonstration of the illusion of free will, ever?
Because do we choose? Really?
🤔
What I've noticed, from literally hours of scrolling through responses, arguments, explanations, discussions, rants, diagrams and the like, and also having conversations with close friends, is that you're kind of one or the other—blue, or red—and that's that.
To the degree that if you're anything like me, and you actually took part in the poll, when initially seeing the results, you were probably surprised at the split – OMG, would you look at that?! Why would anyone vote the other way?! 😮
And I don't think I've seen one example of someone whose position has been genuinely changed by the ensuing discussion, such is the emotiveness—the hard-wired nature—of the topic. (With the obvious caveat of this being social media, where people have very strong opinions that they like to talk about!)
Anyway, aside from people coming after Tim Urban with pitchforks, for having created such unnecessary division in the world, I have found it the most engaging thought experiment I think I've ever come across.
Not to do with whether you're red, or whether you're blue but from how attached people are to the identity created in the process, and what happens when it comes under attack.
The question maybe to ask yourself, when you're musing on this one:
I think that says way more about society than some cleverly-designed, but ultimately silly button-pressing thought experiment.
😘
Giles
p.s. If you want to find out the result, to see how it plays out for your ‘choice’, you'll have to look it up yourself.
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Giles P Croft
…includes whether you choose blue or red 🤷🏻♂️