Honestly I would. Like I wouldn’t hesitate to kill patient zero of a world ending disease.
But then it isn’t a world ending desease, you just killed somebody
The use of a time machine is implied in these situations
Kill the person who invented the trolley problem. It’s the only way to be sure
The logic that nobody would ever die as long as nobody ever pulls falls through when you realize after 33 cycles you’re risking the entire human population on the whims of a stranger and that irrational actors will always exist.
It becomes not if but when.
If you killed patient 0, then it wasn’t a world ending disease either.
232 is roughly four billion. We’ll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.
This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.
Just a little more and every single particle in the universe will be on the tracks, and what the fuck would happen if every particle in the universe was split in twain? Let’s assume it radiated outward from the center of the universe at the speed of light…
so umm if it was every particle, what would be hitting it?
Don’t say my mom.Your mom.
ಠ__ಠ
My god, we’ve figured it out.
How fast is the train going can I make it to the person who’s tied down and lay with them
Maybe there is nobody tied up after the third split, nobody explicitly stated it continues!
I’d get it done and over with. I would resent myself forever, and accept any punishment for it, but it’s better than waiting to see if someone wants to decide to kill off half the world later on. Would be even easier if I could take the first persons spot on the tracks so there only has to be one messed up person rather than two.
Is this some kind of IPv6 joke that’s gone over my head?
The optimal solution to the trolley problem is always the one that makes the least sense because the more chaos injected into any system the less predictable the results will be.
So I pull it, kill the other person at the second lever, and drag throw the person from the first set of tracks to the place where the train switches tracks. wrench the lever free from the top part and place it on the tracks where the train would switch too.
Fucked if I know what the outcome is.
Do you know any of the people involved?
at the 33rd round you do
If you are number 32 the chance is 50/50
How do you know blahblahblah only knows one person? Are you that one person?
What’s wrong with you, don’t you know 4 billion people
50/50
I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn’t go on infinitely. Hear me out:
When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is
0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let’s consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they’d have to pull the lever with likelihoodxso thatx * 2^33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1which would lead tox = 1/2^33or aboutx≈0.0000000001. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I’d guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above1/2^33, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is ‘only’ one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(
I am not seeing it. Are you saying the last person chooses between killing nobody and killing the entire population? Also, what about the intermediary likelihoods of pulling the lever?
They choose between half the whole population and the whole population (very roughly as it aligns alongside exponents of 2)
That’s what the meme is. But the user’s calculation multiplies 1-x by 0, not 1-x by half the population. Or by the future expected value.
Reading this analysis, I think it’s all but guaranteed that the person at the switch on the last step is Davros.
Wait, we were supposed to figure out how to get less ppl ran over?
Schrödingers murder: You are both a murder and not a murder. You are not a murderer as you did not choose to kill a person, but as this can not continue forever you are also a murderer since it is quite certain that eventually someone will choose murder.
Can you murder through innaction? By not pulling the lever, you haven’t changed the system.
Yes. You can. If you are responsible for pulling a lever to stop people from dying, and you don’t, that sounds very murdery to me
Legally speaking, I think the only legally correct (very much not morally) correct thing to do is absolutely nothing whatsoever.
You might be required to call the authorities, but given that either option in theory may eventually lead to the loss of life I think you’d be most safe legally, if you didn’t touch a damn thing.
No, it’s not. log_2 population is what, 33? 32 more people chicken out and we’re either done with this or start killing people who were never born, which is ethically fine.
Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.
With everybody tied up before the 34th track, who exactly is there to push the lever?
More to the point, if everyone is tied up at that point, who tied them up?
- Winnie the Pooh.
- Alice.
- Thanos.
- The Dude.
- Waldo.
- Marry Poppins.
- Rudolph the red nose reindeer.
- Margaret Thatcher.
- Douglas Adams.
- Petunia pot (all dead!)
Agrajag would never
if the choice is always the same and it goes forever, then always choosing to pass means no one gets killed? unless you get to a little shit who breaks the trend
Yes. But it keeps going forever, and eventually some chaotic-evil person will kill choose to kill 2^43 people, which is a thousand times the world’s population.
You didn’t kill that person, the person who invented the problem did.
Philosophy is easy.
You try to save them all by tackling the guy on the second track. The train is 400m from the wye in the track but 375m from the point the second person can decide to flip the switch. You are 270m from the second person. The train travels at a steady 15m/s. You start running at an acceleration of 0.5m/s/s. Can you tackle the second person to prevent them from flipping the switch? Assume flipping the switch means killing the poor tied up folks.
I dunno. I just made up numbers though.
