Memes @lemmy.ml

1y ago

I say double it.

127 comments

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.
  
  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?
- 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.

You gotta double it until it overflows to negatives, then you end up reviving billions of people!
- Then you end up killing more because of massive famine 💀
- And so you end up driving up food and housing demand, with no guarantee that the revived population can provide to the supply side. :P
- Billions of zombies.... that then feast on the living. This could be the worst outcome.
- Slow down Jod.
- Year 2k38, right?
- Although the top comment is a very good answer, this is definitely the best one

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.
  
  Jesus took the wheel
- But it only takes 1 idiot to ruin the whole thing.

What if I want to be the person down the line?

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.

If I must kill 1 person or cause even more death, I suppose I'd kill the person responsible for this scenario.

Successfully explained climate change

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.

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

Double it. Then the other guy will double it, and so on. Infinite loop = no deaths.
- Or straight up 8 billion
  
  Can't kill 8 billion, when half of them are tied to the "no kill" tracks.
  Instead of killing one, you're saving half of humanity! Double it!
- And then there's some psycho on round 34 who kills all 8 billion people alive on earth.
  
  This will create an incentive for people who have 2, 4, 8, maybe even more more people om the tracks to not double, making the idea even worse.
  
  That's on them
- Eventually everyone is tied to the tracks and there’s no one left to change the trolley’s course.
  
  Who said there was a limit?

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.
- 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.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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.

Seems like exactly what politicians are doing. Pass the problems along to the next one.
- The Boomer Method

Gotta find the person tying everyone to these tracks and take them out

I say let it go for 33 doublings (2^33 people), and then decide.

I was gonna just do the one but they do say it's best to pay it forward when you can.

Right is the boomer way.

Throw the switch to pass and then sprint ahead 31 spots so I can kill 4 billion people like Thanos.

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

Also interesting: What would you choose here if you were an evil psychopath? (Asking for an acquaintance.)
- Switch the track from the bottom to the top as the train is half way over the switch, causing the train to drift across both rails hitting all three tied up people and the second switch operator.
  
  MULTI TRACK DRIFTING??!!!
- Electrifying the tracks.
- Depends on if you're happy with someone else killing lot more people, or if you want to kill someone yourself.
  Assuming this goes to infinity, the reasonable thing to do is to kill one person to prevent someone else killing a lot of people. But that would make you directly responsible for killing that person.
  
  Isn't redirecting making you directly responsible for minimum of 2 deaths?

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.

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.

Sunk cost fallacy, just pull it on one person instead of doubling the potential deaths and giving up control over when it will happen.

Easy. I'd just step in front of the train.

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...

this is not a purely theoretical question. in practice, autonomous vehicles face exactly this dilemma. or rather the manufacturers of the vehicles who have to set the specifications
- I forget where it was from but years ago I found an online survey on autonomous cars and their decision making from a university. It was all about deciding to swerve or not in a collision. All kinds of difficult encounters like do you hit the barrier and kill the passenger or swerve and kill the old lady? Do you hit thin person or serve and hit the heavier person?
  I've never seen a survey drill down into biases quite so deeply.
  
  Easy. Prioritize who is saved based on social credit score.
  
  I did this as a part of our ethics discussion.
  My eventual answer was you always kill the non-driver as no one would ever buy a car that will kill them over someone else.
  
  From what I've seen of real world examples, not "what if the car had 5 cats in it and the person on the crosswalk had a stroller full of 6 cat, swerve into a barricade?", telsa cars just release control of the autonomous controls to the person behind the wheel a few seconds before impact so the driver is fully liable.

How OSHA violations are born.

As the famous Double Down Domino would say, "I'm doublin' down!"

I'd try to talk to the person on the track to see if they were an asshole and decide from there.

Addressing Climate Change.

I think everyone here is missing the real answer. If you look at the picture you will notice a third option, there are track switches, two of them, you can bypass the people tied to the track, then kill the monster forcing you to kill for no reason.

What does "double it" mean? Double what?

Can I move the rails to kill them all and then circle around and hit me?
- The zoomer way
  ~~For legal purposes this is a joke~~

127 comments