1y ago

Recursion

103 comments

I'd pull the lever to kill one person immediately. Assuming the decision maker at each stage is a different person with different opinions on moral, ethical, religious, and logical questions, then it's a near certainty that someone is going to pull the lever to kill the people at their stage. If you're lucky, it's the very next guy. If you're not, it's the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later. If I'm the first guy, I'll take the moral hit to save the larger number of people.
- If you're not, it's the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later
  I feel like running over all those bodies would make the train come to a stop way before it ran over a million people.
  Now I sit back and wait for some morbid soul who is better at math and physics than me to figure out the answer.
  
  Now if we assume the victims tied up are frictionless orbs, and the train is also a frictionless orb, and the two of them are travelling in a frictionless void than I reckon we could kill a few more.
  
  I mean if you're going fast enough with a pointy train, you could chop up people pretty easy. You just need to make sure that each person is a tire width apart to make sure the wheels don't lose traction. Assuming a person is roughly half a metre across and a tire is 75cm in diameter, we get 1.25m per person, so a track of 1250km for a million people. Not very long at all.
- I agree with your logic, so far as it goes. However, there are, currently, just over eight billion humans in existence. If my quick, over-tired math is correct, that means only 34 people have to say no, until we run out of people to tie to the tracks. Assuming, at that point, the system collapses and nobody dies, I'd guess 34 people would refuse - might be the better choice.
  
  Would you trust the entirety of human existence to be decided by 34 people? In my experience from watching reality TV, the last one always screws the rest over for their own benefit.
  Imagine being the last one. You could singlehandedly wipe out half the global population. This would normally be a bad thing, and it is, but it would also make every surviver twice as rich, solve food scarcity and halve the pollution, perhaps even saving humanity from itself.
  If that's not enough, think about everyone now having double the amount of kittens and half the traffic on the roads.
  
  Oh yeah. I was assuming an infinite series (somehow). Also, odds are good that out of 34 people, one of them would misunderstand the rules or be crazy enough to do it anyway for various reasons. I'd probably still do it.
  
  After we run out of people, they start adding cats & dogs.
- Exactly. If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act. At the risk of taking a shitpost way too seriously, if you were in that situation and actively chose to leave the decision to someone else to kill double the people, then you acted unethically.
  
  Technically the 2nd guy could just let it go through and nobody dies. However if it was to double over and over forever until it stopped, then technically the best option is to just double it forever. Nobody would ever die? If someone decided to end "the game" as it were and kill some people, then that's on them.
- On the one hand, the possibility exists that the buck gets passed forever, especially as the kill count numbers grow substantially making the impermissibility of allowing the deaths grow with it. It's not likely the any given person would kill one stranger, let alone millions.
  On the other hand, in an infinite series, even something with miniscule odds will still eventually inevitably happen, and some psycho will instantly become the most infamous murderer in history, followed immediately by the person that didn't just kill one person and end the growth before it started.
- I think this is a good metaphor for how humanity has "dealt" with problems like climate change.
  If you make a tough decision, it causes hardship now, but prevents hardship in the future. If you don't make a tough decision now, someone in the future has to either kill a lot of people, or just pass the buck to the next guy. People justify not making the tough decisions by saying that maybe eventually down the line someone will have an easy decision and there will be nobody on the side path, even though all observable evidence says that the number of people on that path just keeps growing exponentially.
- If you are really unlucky the number doubles so many time you end up tied on the tracks.
- But what if you're the tenth person with 1024 on the line? Or the 20th person with 1,048,576? Etc. Is there ever a point (before it's everyone, in which case risk doesn't increase) where you stop pulling it?
  
  I don't think so.

If we all collectively agree to just pass it on, then either:
It's infinite, and it just passes on forever, or...
It's not infinite and somebody at the end has no choice, in which case nobody in charge of a lever has killed anyone
So yeah, I say pass it on.
- Except that somewhere down that chain someone is almost certainly going to choose to kill people, so by passing the trolley on down to them you're responsible for killing a lot more than if you ended it right now.
  And since every rational person down the line is going to think that, they'll all be itching to pull the "kill" lever first chance they get. So you know that you need to pull the kill lever immediately to minimize the number of deaths.
  
  Only the person pulling the lever is responsible for his/her action though. There is a difference between passively passing on and actively murder someone
  
  I guess then the issue would be: do you ever find out the result of your actions? If no, then I guess it's sort of a "glass half empty/full" kind of thing, because you could just pass it on and assume the best and just go live your life quite happily.
  Although if you did find out the result, imagine being first, pulling the lever and then finding out nobody else would have.
- If it's infinite, you'd basically be gambling that no evil person exists.
- If it's infinite (up to the current human population), we're all tied up on the tracks. Unless we're leaving out the exact number of people that would bring it to approximately the full population, I guess.
  As long as I'm not on the tracks, I'll take the hit and kill one instead of risking a potential genocide.

Step in front of the train: Tell your manager this whole project is dumb, provide a list of reasons why it's a bad idea and explain you are prepared to resign rather than enable its further development.

Someone needs to stop tying people to those train tracks or this trolley problem will never go away.

MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!! Which also kills the other lever guy, bonus!
- KANSEI DORIFTO

Double it and I'll do it myself
- Yeah, who even needs a trolley?

Just keep doubling forever until the number is more than everyone alive, free s-risk emergency button.
- This might cause a buffer overload that crashes the programming and we can escape the matrix together once and for all
  
  But what if we are all NPCs?

Half-pull the lever so that the points get stuck midway between the two tracks. That should derail the trolley. Someone could conceivably still get hurt, but it improves everyone's chances.
(What? You mean it isn't a literal trolley that has to obey the laws of physics? Damn.)
- News next day, 10 dead in derailment.
  
  Ten baby puppies to be exact
- Philosophy problems vs all real world problems

Napkin math, from the last time I saw this:
I’ve been thinking about this. I estimate a few people per 1000 would do an atrocity for no reason if they were guaranteed no consequences, and the deaths if the switch is pulled are 2^(n-1) for the nth switch. The expected deaths will cross 1 somewhere in the high single-digits, then (since it’s outcome*chance), so the death minimising strategy is actually to pull yours if the chain is at least that long.
Edit: This assumes the length of the chain is variable but finite, and the trolley stops afterwards. If it's infinite obviously you pull the switch.
- Could you elaborate what you are analysing here? If I dont misinterpret the model, the option where you dont double the victims minimizes deaths every time.
  
  Ah, but then you're giving the opportunity to the next guy to kill even more, if he wants. Most people obviously won't want to do that, but a rare few will, and the body count gets so big so fast that it only takes a few switches before that's a bad risk.
  I was expecting a bigger number of switches, but I guess that's just another example of humans being bad at tracking the consequences of large quantities.

There is one person in danger.
Now I pull the lever.
Now there are two _______
- person in dangers
  
  I'm afraid you failed the wug test, or rather one of many wugs test.

Modern financial system in one picture.

Just walk away and assume the original engineer put safety measures in place.
- If you pull the lever after the trolley's first set of wheels has passed the switch but before its last set of wheels has passed the switch then you'll derail the trolley and everyone lives.
  
  Except the guy in the trolley
  
  Yeah, not a bad answer! I’d assume someone is on the trolley too, but that’s just an assumption and, hey, maybe they would survive the wreck anyway!

If we keep doubling, will I eventually be a person on the tracks? There are a finite number of people, so eventually I would be, right? So, passing the buck would be equivalent to handing my fate to a stranger.
OTOH, if there are an infinite number of people, then this thought experiment is creating people out of thin air. Do these imaginary people's rhetorical lives even matter?
Either way, it seems better to kill 1 person at the start.
- If it creates infinite number of people, it could solve world hunger with some good ol' Soylent green thinking. Although you might want to figure out how to slow down the trolley at some point.

This is a screenshot from here https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
- I did it and it was fun but the one in the post wasn't there and neither does the font and layout fit.

Damn. That’s the politician way of thinking!!!

What is the base case for this?

Choosing the second option will trap an infinite people for eternity in this problem, because it would never stop
- Oh I promise you it'll stop, just with a greater death toll. It probably wouldn't take that long to stop either.
- You should only be released once someone decides to let all of their track people die.

„I pull this lever and suddenly it’s not my problem anymore“

Depends on how much I'm getting paid..

THE MORE THE MERRIER!!!

"hey hun i've got an exciting business opportunity for you!!1!"

I don't have to be a soldier on anyone's ethical recursion war, so since the default position is set to kill 1 person, that gets done by the problem itself and the whole thing is solved without me having to do anything.
As a further bonus, now the lever people on the next branches are free to get out of the levels and go release the other prisoners.

The main problem with this is: is there a finite number of people? and if I pass it on do I count as part of the pool that will end up on the tracks?

To me this basically says are you the kind of person to deal with a problem or pass it on to someone else
- It doesn't seem like the problem in question is yours to begin with though. Maybe the train will get stopped or people will get released.

por qué no los dos

Sounds like TikTok challenges. Oh boy.

if you're a decent person you double it, if the person on the track is a republican you let it motor on through
- go back to reddit
  
  Aww did the little rightie not like being made fun of?
- Apart from making it political for no reason, how on earth did you come to the conclusion that doubling the kill count and putting the responsibility on someone else makes you a decent person?
  
  doubling the future possible kill count is inherently better, republicans aside, than killing someone right now. wait for it, you'll get there.

103 comments