Is this some kind of IPv6 joke that’s gone over my head?
Schrödingers murder: You are both a murder and not a murder. You are not a murderer as you did not choose to kill a person, but as this can not continue forever you are also a murderer since it is quite certain that eventually someone will choose murder.
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.
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
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.
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
Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.
Well… If I could double it forever eventually it will run out of people to run over
We’ll have matrix-style human farms producing people for the tracks.
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”!
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
I would, because the second track potentially scales to infinity, and pulling the lever is the only sure way to minimize the death and suffering.
Also, if everyone avoids pulling the lever, you technically have an infinite amount of people who will die and an infinite amount of guilty consciences, also an infinite amount of people blaming the last guy for forcing the decision on them, like the most messed up version of the infinity hotel.
Also, the infinity of people who die is also significantly larger and less quantifiable than the number of leaver guys.
But once you get to round 33, everyone on earth is tied to the track, so there’s no one to pull the lever. That means that the trolley safely passes by, giving everyone ample time to free themselves. Eventually, the trolley stops due to friction with the track and air, plus brakes if it’s using them, and then we all stop getting tied to tracks.
The trolley will probably stop before you reach infinity luckily
