I take the square root of the negative trolley, then use my imaginary streetcar to establish a complex track so I can start killing in an additional dimension.
It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.
The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.
The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.
Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.
Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).
I’m pretty sure that leads to multi-track drifting, and so all the people die.
Source: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/000/727/DenshaDeD_ch01p16-17.jpg
🤣
Don’t worry, the first body or two will take care of it!
I think you just passed the Trolley version of the Kobayashi Maru. Well done.
Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.
I’m no expert, but I’d expect such a slow moving trolley to eventually derail itself anyway on account of all the corpses
Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.
Way to stop the trolly problem dead in its tracks.
If the leading wheels are allowed to continue any interval down the original track, uncountably infinitely many people die.
Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.
Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)
I think that wad the premise, yeah.
At any point in time, a finite amount of time has passed, and the trolley has killed a finite amount of people. The correct track is the one that, at any given time, will have killed fewer people. Unless the trolley speeds up to account for that and always kills n people per second, the top track will result in less deaths over any period of time.
The straight ahead track actually kills an infinite number of people every interval of time.
The train tracks are linear time on Earth. It’s basically the choice between letting people be killed or dying of old age.
All trolleys to date have been finite. A trolley which can kill an infinite number of people would truly be a marvel of engineering.
Every finite trolley passes infinitely many points when moves, if you accept space as infinitly divisible (structured as the real numbers).
Assuming that it takes some amount of energy to kill one person, and that the trolley doesn’t have an engine with infinite power, choosing the bottom track would save lives. The trolley would have to expend an infinite amount of energy to move any distance from the starting point, so it would just get stuck there while trying to crush the unimaginable amount of people bunched up in front of it.
But getting anywhere on the lower track will kill infinitely many people. You cannot kill finitely many people on the lower track. Well, unless you derail at exactly the first. On the upper track, a stop at any point will have killed only finitely many.
One person can only be on the spot for one number. As soon as more than one gets killed, that would mean that the trolley has traversed some distance, which implies that it has killed an infinite number of people. That is impossible in any finite timespan under the aforementioned assumption. Thus the only logical conclusion is that it gets stuck after the first person is killed, at the exact spot the first number is mapped to.
I guess there could also be a different solution when you look at the problem from a different angle. Treating infinity with this little mathematical care tends to cause paradoxes.
In any non-empty, finite interval on the real number line, there are uncountably infinitely many numbers = people in this thought experiment. If you think of physical space as continuous, we cross infinitely many points in any finite movement.
I’d like to see one of the numerous paradoxes you refer to.
Pull the lever, thus killing -1/12th people.
Killing -1/12th? I didn’t know it can revive people.
That trolleys going to derail eventually. So the one with more people since they are tightly packed and it can’t build momentum.
But isn’t it more likely to derail if it gains momentum?
Depends
I expect it would be more able to cleanly cut through the bodies or throw them out of the way with more momentum. If it’s going slow it’s more likely to ride up on top of a body. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that derailers tend not to work on fast moving trains.
“Eventually” on the densely packed track - even if almost instant - means uncountably many deaths. On the upper track, any eventual stop will result in only finitely many deaths.
Huh?
Any non-empty interval on the real number line holds uncountably infinitely many points.
The top track can be assumed to be of infinite length, but for the bottom track this is not enough - to fit ℵ people on it, they’ll have to be infinitely compressed. And since they are compressed - they are already dead. I’m not pulling the lever - preventing the (farther) desecration of corpses does not merit killing people who are still alive.
As a mathematician, this strikes me as an entirely reasonable interpretation, except for the fact that the compressed bodies would form a black hole, killing everyone regardless.
So you’re correct to say that you wouldn’t pull the lever, but your reasoning still missed an important detail.
I don’t think a black hole would have time to form before the entire universal collapse, though
that’s infinite mass inside infinite volume right there, we aren’t talking about only infinite density anymore
we need to get a theoretical physicist on this… track
Everybody dies, no matter what choice you make. It’s just a matter of time.
There are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, none of which are 3.
Then wouldn’t that make this statement false?
Which statement?
There are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, none of which are 3.
If there are infinite numbers, then there’s 3 in there somewhere. If 3 is not there then it’s not infinite.
Oh okay.
If there are infinite numbers, then there’s 3 in there somewhere.
No, this is not true. Just because you have infinitely many numbers in some collection, doesn’t mean one of the numbers in your collection has to be 3.
Look at the number line. There are infinitely many numbers on the number line between 1 and 2. For example 1+1/2, 1+1/4, 1+1/8, … are in there (among many others). But all of the numbers between 1 and 2 are strictly smaller than 3, so none of them can be 3.
Alternatively, there are infinitely many numbers strictly smaller than 3, none of which are 3 either.
If 3 is not there then it’s not infinite.
Well consider the set of numbers 3+1, 3+2, 3+3, 3+4, … (the set of integer numbers strictly larger than 3). This set of numbers is also infinite and does not contain 3. So a set being infinite doesn’t imply it must contain the number 3.
Ah, thank you for the explanation. That makes sense now.
what do you do?
I replace the lever with a quantum switch so it can be a superppsition and kill everyone twice be ause they deserve it I mean look at that massive line of people there is no way they didn’t know what was going on before egtting added to the tracks no species thos dumb deserves to escape the trolly my god how did they all get there -continues ranting as trolly aproaches-
PAUSE
And this makes about as much sense as the original question so no educating me!
resumes ranting
Sorry, but technically you would kill infinite people, which while twice as many as infinite people is still the same amount of infinite people…
Might I suggest getting infinite doctors to try and rescue some run over people so they can in fact go to the end of the line and be killed a second…maybe even infinite times.
Shit man if there’s an infinite amount of people there must also be an infinite amount of track. So forget philosophy, I’m getting rich!
I kill the trolley driver. The Dead Man button makes that the trolley stops.
If you let the train go, it would appear to stop immediately at the first person (assuming it has any reaction whatsoever to hitting a person) as there are infinitely real numbers between any two real numbers you could come up with.
Reminds me of this: https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
This is f’ing hilarious 🤣
This is awesome
I just tried to kill the most people every time and apparently a lot of people agree with me
As an Engineer with a Physics background I say the most ethical choice is the real numbers side as the tram, having no room to accelerate between victims, will quickly stop, whilst it’s more likely it can keep going for ever on the integer branch of the line.
A more effective vehicle for this would be a tank or maybe a steamroller.
(Note to self: keep this in mind if I ever become an Evil Overlord and need to execute large numbers of people in a gruesome manner)
I’m just waiting for the black hole to form just from the mass of the infinite people between 0-1 on the Reals track.
