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.
Maybe there is nobody tied up after the third split, nobody explicitly stated it continues!
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 :(
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.
The trolley problem thought experiment does a whole lot of work to define personal responsibility. IRL it’s difficult to be the guy who does the evil thing for a good outcome, and easy to kick the can to the next guy, even while making it worse.
Well… If I could double it forever eventually it will run out of people to run over
Everyone just doubles it and we’re good
That’s kind of how it feels like living in the modern age to be honest. We’re just doubling it until somebody decides to pull the lever.
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
If you killed patient 0, then it wasn’t a world ending disease either.
The use of a time machine is implied in these situations
Easy choice. Everyone could just leave right now and nobody would die. If someone actively decides to kill people, that’s not on anyone who chose not to themselves.
A interesting twist would be that you’re held accountable for the death(s) when you pull the lever. Would you risk life in prison to stop the death toll from doubling?
It would sit well with my conscience that I likely prevented a worse fate for exponentially more people, and prevented another person from having to make a worse choice. Which they themselves would likely only make twice as worse, and so on. I could live with that.
What I’m not sure of is how I would handle being a deicision-maker N steps down the line. Being the first guy, sure. The 16th? I dunno.
With everybody tied up before the 34th track, who exactly is there to push the lever?
- Winnie the Pooh.
- Alice.
- Thanos.
- The Dude.
- Waldo.
- Marry Poppins.
- Rudolph the red nose reindeer.
- Margaret Thatcher.
- Douglas Adams.
- Petunia pot (all dead!)
Do you know any of the people involved?
at the 33rd round you do
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Not quite. Round 33 will have 2^32 people, or a bit over half the population of Earth. Remember, round 1 has one person, 2^(0), not 2^(1).
How many rounds until the first switch operator is on the tracks?
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Finally a life without shame.
If you are number 32 the chance is 50/50
How do you know blahblahblah only knows one person? Are you that one person?
50/50
I wouldn’t. The likeliness of the next person choosing to kill even more people decreases fast with each iteration. And, I believe we can find 30 people who aren’t willing to become mass murderers pretty easily, even if they are selected randomly
Except for the fact it goes on infinitely, and somebody will eventually choose to kill
Except for the fact that nuh uh. Persons are finite
Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.
You’ll eventually have to include alien life. What a great way to see if aliens exist!
This is also Thanos wet dream come true. Keep racking up the “pass”!
