I say double it.

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Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
- At some people you will run out of people to tie to the tracks.
  
  How many branches is that going to take? Just out of interest.
  
  Only 32
  
  math checks out. log2(8 billion) ~= 32.9
  
  It's a little more complicated than that. You have to be summing everyone who is still tied to all the previous tracks. It needs to be a geometric sum formula.
  
  You could just move them over whenever someone decides to double it up. That way the person that was going to die alone is doomed to die anyway. 😂
  
  I wonder if we do stack it till every human is tied to the track whos at the lever?
  Does the train/AI decide?
  
  The current version of GPT is willing to sacrifice billions of robots for humanities sake. However, it proposed to strap alien civilizations to the track next. And in that case it would choose to save the larger group…
  
  It'll just be one fewer junctions. 2^{n is always one more than the sum of 2}1+...2^(n-1)
  
  I think you have to include 2^0 for that to be true?
  e.g 2^{0 = 1, 2}1 = 2 2^{0 + 2}1 = 1 + 2 = 3, 2^2 = 4 … 7, 8 15,16 31, 32 etc.
  
  2^33 is approximately 8.5 billion, which is roughly the population of the world.
  
  So the 32nd person decides to either kill half of humanity and end the scenario, or give someone the power to end human kind...
  
  And then there are only 32 people who will live. Trolley doesn't have a driver i imagine, they died of a heart attack or something.
  
  🤣
  
  Long before that, you'd run out of track to tie to the people.
  
  A later choice of nobody on each track would be ideal. Even a psycho at the switch would be unable to kill.
  
  I’d tie myself to the tracks tbh gotta end this cycle of suffering somehow 😩
- Some day it reaches a person that thinks...
  Well, 4 billion people less is better than someone being able to wipe out humanity...
  (it would also solve many problems lol)
  (and that point would be after 32 people had the choice...)
  
  Thanos waiting patiently in line 💀
  
  Meanwhile Thanos is on the third switch and very frustrated. (He would double it and pass it to the next person - there's no point in killing four people when there's a chance that the second-to-last guy might kill half of humanity.)
- This is really the only answer. The only thing that makes it "hard" is having to face the brutality of moral calculus
  
  Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
  
  The thing to do is kill now even if it's thousands. Because it's only going to get worse.
  The best time to kill was the first trolly. The second best time to kill is now.
  
  Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
  If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you're actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
  Very interesting one!
  
  It's not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it's still barely even a choice.
  "Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?"
  If you can't choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it's my kid versus a billion? That's not a choice, that's just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
  
  Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
  What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
  So a more interesting dilemma would have been "would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.". Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes "do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?". Even more interestingly "limiting the damage now" makes you the "psycho" in that sense...
  
  The fact of the game never ending is what made the choice too easy, you're right.
  EDITED
  For this study you want sociopathy, not psychopathy. I can report from my wasted psych degree that sociopathy occurs in 1-2% of the population.
  Binary probability tells us that if you repeat a 1% chance test 32 times, you have a 95% chance of never seeing it.
  Don't pull the lever. Sorry for the ninja edit, I misread something.
  
  you have a 95% chance of never seeing it. Don’t pull the lever.
  I'm confused: 0.99^32 = 0.72, not 0.95. And if you know that everyone except the last guy won't pull the lever, that's still a 1% chance of killing everyone on earth (average expected deaths: 70 million) is way worse than definitely killing one person!
  (Edit: unless "don't pull the lever" means killing that one person, because it isn't clear which is the default "no action" outcome. In which case, never mind.)
  (Edit 2: if you know the 34th and last person might be a sociopath, you're best off if the first 27 people might also be sociopaths.)
  
  How could you know someone else is going to do it though? And how is their decision your responsibility?
  If you kill someone you are a killer. It's that simple.
- Eventually there might also be a track with no people on it so postponing the dilemma becomes much better than at least 1 death. But there is no way of knowing what the future dilemma might be.
- But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more.
  I disagree. The blood is not on your hands.
  Suppose you see someone walking towards a bank with a gun. You have an opportunity to steal their gun. If you don't, and they go on to kill 5 people in an armed robbery, is the blood on your hands?
  Suppose you see a hunter in the woods with a gun. You have an opportunity to kill them. If you don't, and they go fire on a city street and kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
  Suppose you see a juvenile delinquent on the path to being a serial killer. You have an opportunity to kill an old lady in front of them to scare them straight. If you don't, and they go on to kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
  Suppose you see a newborn baby. You have an opportunity to kill them. If you don't, and they grow up to become a terrorist and kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
- That leads to another interesting split path. Maybe it’s best to just kill the one right away. Assuming this goes on forever, it’s basically inevitable that someone somehow will end up killing an obscene number of people eventually. But maybe it’d be like nukes, and eventually reach a point where flipping the lever is just mutually assured destruction, and no one would ever actually do that
- Assuming of course that it goes on forever. Which admittedly seems like what one is intended to think, but the graphic doesn't actually show or state that, and realistically, if actually given this scenario, it shouldn't, because eventually some limit will be encountered that makes it impossible for the problem to physically exist (like running out of people to tie to the tracks, running out of space for them, having such a large amount of stuff in one space that it undergoes gravitational collapse, the finite size of the observable universe making fitting an infinite dilemma impossible, etc.)
- Yeah so it would be tough to decide if you wanted to be at an early, middle, or late junction. All depends on how to people on the switches think.
- It's a bad dilemma because if we repeat the process we only end up with one deranged lunatic.

127 comments