Loop continues until entire human population tied to track and there’s nobody left to pass the switch to. kill the scapegoat on round one and done
So how does that killing thing work, doing it by yourself or just thinking and the person dies?
I think with this scenario it’s indirectly caused by you. Either you ‘press a button,’ directly resulting in the death of a specific individual, or another person is given the same scenario but the button directly causes double the number of deaths if they press it.
Guess the kill one person thing isn’t that bad then. There are quite some people doing major bullshit right now…
People always miss the bigger picture with these things. Why do these trolleys’ brakes keep failing? Is it a design flaw in the braking system? Is the maintenance crew severely underfunded? Is it a slippage problem due to improper rail maintenance? It’s a shame we can’t even organize a work stoppage to sort this out since congress blocked the trolley union from striking…
Considering someone is tied to the tracks I’d assume it’s sabotaged
Continuously double it so that the trolley has as much room as it needs to brake to a complete halt, therefore killing 0 people.
The real questions are, “Who is fueling and piloting the trolly, and can we kill them?”
Math-wise, it won’t take long until they are tied to the track with us and everyone else.
So you’re saying they’d be… exponentially fucked?
I feel like due to the weight of the train, in math terms they’d be divided.
Jesus took the wheel
But it only takes 1 idiot to ruin the whole thing.
Welcome to climate policy.
That implies that if nobody tries to stop climate change, it’ll never destroy the world.
Perhaps it roughly analogizes to Zeno’s Paradox.
Kill 1 person. I feel it would be cowardly to pass the buck and risk killing 2.
Lest they do the same and kill 4, etc.
But what happens when you get to, say, the 34th person, and there are 2^33 people tied up, more than there are living humans in the world? Pass the buck, break the simulation, save the world
I’ve never been much of a gambler. I’ll stick with my one kill.
How OSHA violations are born.
Sunk cost fallacy, just pull it on one person instead of doubling the potential deaths and giving up control over when it will happen.
What if I want to be the person down the line?
Ahh yes, the Bioware solution as seen on Mass Effect 3’s DLC.
Lever half way and it crashes.
Attempting to subvert the thought experiment only makes things worse. The trolley is full of child prodigies, all future geniuses that will cure cancer and solve the world’s problems. By sticking the lever halfway you kill all of them. The only way to save the child prodigies is to choose, left or right.
You couldn’t even bother putting in adult scientists that have already helped the world. It’s a hypothetical scenario, you know, you can put in anyone you want. So I’m putting the child prodigies to a test by having the save themselves from the half-lever. Should be relatively easy for them.
Might hit the 2nd guy with a lever and the peeps behind him depending on speed.
It might. Still better odds.
Oh, 100%. Fuck the next generation, I mean person.
They simply have to choose not kill anyone.
Nobody in this situation ever has to die. It is not some difficult choice that you are burdening the next person with. The choice is obvious.
You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person
Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you’d need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.
Well what about the fact that after 34 people the entire population is tied to the tracks. What are the chances that one person out of 35 wants to destroy humanity?
Also thing the entire human population to the tracks is going to cause some major logistical problems, how are you going to feed them all?
Oh come on. A trolley is not going to have the momentum to kill that many people nor would the machinery make it through. The gears and whatnot would be totally gummed up after like 20 or so people.
I just calculated the sum from n=0 to 32 (because 2^33>current global population). And that calculation implies that the chance of catching someone willing to kill all of humanity would have to be lower than 1/8 billion for the expected value of doubling it to be larger than just killing one person.
Yeah I think I was in a stupor when I commented. I don’t think I even tried to understand your comment. My apologies. But now that I am trying, I am struggling to understand the notation.
You don’t even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.
It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.
It’s always “double it” Anyone after 34 flips the kill all humans, that’s their fault not yours
Why do you care whose fault it is? You’d want to minimise human deaths, not win a blame game.
Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.
Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it’s them doing it. I’m invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.
Idk which moral system you operate under, but I’m concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don’t follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don’t really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).
My moral system somehow does not chose to kill people through action against an imagined threat and is therefore objectively superior as is it not susceptible to hostile memetic manipulation (Molloch, Pascal’s wager, Pascal’s mugging, basilisks, social hysteria etc.) and is capable of escaping false choices and other contrived scenarios, breaking premise and the rules of the game as needed to obtain the desired outcome.
Successfully explained climate change
Gotta find the person tying everyone to these tracks and take them out
