Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Trolley Problem Problem

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 119 posts

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#101

Post by implements »

dannykwells wrote: post #24

Could this be due to the rise of pure mathematics in influencing philosophers? In pure math, counter examples play a very important role: show once counter example, disprove an entire claim. The violinist in the article is clearly trying to be a pure math- like counter example, but to me, misses the emotional aspect of pregnancy (at the least) - a fetus is not a random person, it is you (partly), and furthermore, man…

> society [...] depend on having babies,

But civilisation doesn’t depend on maximising births, and actually probably would benefit from more resource intensive to produce artists, musicians, dancers, etc - is the other side of that argument.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#102

Post by ponker »

luckylion wrote: post #85
ponker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked in AV? “Save Driver” vs “Save Pedestrian” isn’t actually a problem that comes up in the real world. There’s never a situation where you’d use a pedestrian as a meat bag to absorb a collision or fling a driver over a median to save a pedestrian. The dilemma is completely a philosophical construct, no self driving car will ever need to solve it. In reality, saving drivers and saving pedestrians are comp…

That's not the typical problem in AV's trolley problem, nobody argues (publicly) "the driver should always be first". You don't even need the driver to play a role, you can use an AV truck, train or drone. "Your brakes are gone, you cannot decrease speed. You are on a collision course with 10 people who are crossing the street. You can slightly alter your direction to run over one person instead." You can alter that…

What I am saying is that in for both meatbag and AI drivers, the “brakes failed headed towards a crowd” situation is so rare that the driver has neither the time nor experience/training data to make any kind of well-reasoned ethical decisions, and basically ends up performing an action that is close to random, and that the situation is so rare that the impact isn’t relevant when policymaking/regulating AV. It’s like the difference between the deaths from drunk drivers and the deaths from drivers being stung by bees (which do exist, but not enough to make rules like every car needs a bee repellent).

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#103

Post by yyyk »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #86
castratikron wrote: post #40

Stallman said it better: The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can shunt it to a different track where it would only kill one person, should you do it? Or what if you could save those five by throwing a person near you onto the tracks; should you do it? Many people feel intuitively that it would be wrong to throw that person ont…

> The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. We're living the trolley problem problem in real life, right now, because human beings are bad at estimating risk. A lot of people are operating with a certainty that IF you are EXPOSED to the virus, you WILL contract it, and it WILL be terrible, and PROBABLY fatal. Therefore, no amount of safekeeping -- masks, distanc…

I don't see how this could be framed as a trolley problem. A trolley problem needs to compare two equivalent goods, where intentional 'action' is likely to cause less overall loss but at a direct cost to an 3rd party. Neither side regarding lockdown views this problem as such:

People who support aggressive measures don't view their actions as killing the bystander. 'Financial hardship' is far from letting people die (i.e. no equivalent good from their PoV) and they almost always support measures to alleviate economic damage.

People who oppose lockdown have differing arguments which don't map into a trolley either. An argument for lack of efficiency isn't relevant. Others' argument that governments' action is taking away liberty for security is closer, but no trolley either. For that, they'd have to weigh liberty of 'bystanders' again liberty of those that will get sick, and it's clear their concept of liberty does not accept the latter condition as a loss of liberty (no equivalent good either).

You might wish to drop my suggested equivalent good criteria. I'm not so sure. If diverting the trolley merely slightly inconveniences the bystander, are we still talking about a trolley problem?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#104

Post by baddox »

leghifla wrote: post #79
baddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems overblown. Would you ever ride in a car with a driver that might sacrifice the lives of everyone in the car to save 1,000 people? I suspect that lots of people have actively made decisions while driving their own car that endangers their own life in order to potentially save the life of someone else.

Well, I would not want to get into the car of someone with a driving habit of risking the live of 1000 people in the first place. The real solution to this is to avoid situations where such choice must be made, by keeping safe distances and speed. Good drivers do this naturally. AI must do this too.

That’s never part of the thought experiment. The trolley problem isn’t asking whether you should risk one life or risk 100 lives. It’s asking what you would do in a situation that you were placed into.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#105

Post by luckylion »

ponker wrote: post #102
luckylion wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the typical problem in AV's trolley problem, nobody argues (publicly) "the driver should always be first". You don't even need the driver to play a role, you can use an AV truck, train or drone. "Your brakes are gone, you cannot decrease speed. You are on a collision course with 10 people who are crossing the street. You can slightly alter your direction to run over one person instead." You can alter that…

What I am saying is that in for both meatbag and AI drivers, the “brakes failed headed towards a crowd” situation is so rare that the driver has neither the time nor experience/training data to make any kind of well-reasoned ethical decisions, and basically ends up performing an action that is close to random, and that the situation is so rare that the impact isn’t relevant when policymaking/regulating AV. It’s like…

Essentially: it's rare, we shouldn't worry about it?

I don't think that's a valid argument. A driver may not have a lot of time to ponder the consequences of his actions (but you can create a hypothetical that would give him a few seconds, of course, but hypothetical situations are an issue in this thread), but that doesn't mean the AV that's not as limited in recognition and calculations shouldn't calculate probable outcomes and make a decision, even if it's rare. And once you agree that it should if it can, there's no sense in saying "but we shouldn't talk about what it should optimize for".

And of course, we can generally expect that if it is possible, that it will be done and Mercedes will ask: who's paying us, the person in the car or the person outside the car, so they will gravitate towards saving their customer. At that point you have made the decision, but you've avoided having a debate over ethics.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#106

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

yyyk wrote: post #103
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. We're living the trolley problem problem in real life, right now, because human beings are bad at estimating risk. A lot of people are operating with a certainty that IF you are EXPOSED to the virus, you WILL contract it, and it WILL be terrible, and PROBABLY fatal. Therefore, no amount of safekeeping -- masks, distanc…

I don't see how this could be framed as a trolley problem. A trolley problem needs to compare two equivalent goods, where intentional 'action' is likely to cause less overall loss but at a direct cost to an 3rd party. Neither side regarding lockdown views this problem as such: People who support aggressive measures don't view their actions as killing the bystander. 'Financial hardship' is far from letting people die…

I wasn't arguing that the virus response was a trolley problem, but that it was a "trolley problem problem." Your response is almost too good to be true.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#107

Post by yyyk »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #106
yyyk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this could be framed as a trolley problem. A trolley problem needs to compare two equivalent goods, where intentional 'action' is likely to cause less overall loss but at a direct cost to an 3rd party. Neither side regarding lockdown views this problem as such: People who support aggressive measures don't view their actions as killing the bystander. 'Financial hardship' is far from letting people die…

I wasn't arguing that the virus response was a trolley problem, but that it was a "trolley problem problem." Your response is almost too good to be true.

Ouch. I guess I fell into the trap where one reads a word and doesn't notice it repeats twice (trolley problem problem).

But I think I still got the jist of your argument: That people supporting lockdown are applying trolley problem logic ("hurt the economical bystanders to save sick people").

What I wrote in response applies. That isn't trolley logic since the goods are noncomparable. I'll go further: financial harms in general aren't a good fit for a trolley problem, since one can always compensate later.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#108

Post by ponker »

luckylion wrote: post #105
ponker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is that in for both meatbag and AI drivers, the “brakes failed headed towards a crowd” situation is so rare that the driver has neither the time nor experience/training data to make any kind of well-reasoned ethical decisions, and basically ends up performing an action that is close to random, and that the situation is so rare that the impact isn’t relevant when policymaking/regulating AV. It’s like…

Essentially: it's rare, we shouldn't worry about it? I don't think that's a valid argument. A driver may not have a lot of time to ponder the consequences of his actions (but you can create a hypothetical that would give him a few seconds, of course, but hypothetical situations are an issue in this thread), but that doesn't mean the AV that's not as limited in recognition and calculations shouldn't calculate probable…

Essentially: the situation only exists in the contrived world of ethicists, so the problem may be important for ethicists to solve but isn't important for AV engineers to solve.

It's like asking a parent the question, "If both your kids were falling off a cliff at the exact same time and you could only save one of them, which one would you save." The parents says "well whichever one is closer to me." The ethicist says "No they are the exact same distance from you, with the one near your non-dominant arm exactly the amount closer to you to cancel out the advantage of your dominant arm." Well, Okay. It's a stressful question to be asked and to try to answer, but the answer in the actual real world is that the situation doesn't actually exist, and even if you were to replay the universe 5 quintillion times until the situation came up, the flesh and blood parent would panic in the moment and save neither one. So ethicists can debate the situation ad infinitum and entertain themselves doing so, but the situation only exists in the contrived world, so the answer doesn't matter.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#109

Post by imtringued »

I dislike these types of thought experiments because they always involve a preexisting problem where a random bystander has to become a hero that has to save everyone. There are a lot of situations in which fate is just playing out and you can't do anything about it and struggling will only make everything worse. In reality, the hero doesn't actually know which lever will actually save lives and he also doesn't know if the people he is saving are actually in danger.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#110

Post by luckylion »

ponker wrote: post #108
luckylion wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially: it's rare, we shouldn't worry about it? I don't think that's a valid argument. A driver may not have a lot of time to ponder the consequences of his actions (but you can create a hypothetical that would give him a few seconds, of course, but hypothetical situations are an issue in this thread), but that doesn't mean the AV that's not as limited in recognition and calculations shouldn't calculate probable…

Essentially: the situation only exists in the contrived world of ethicists, so the problem may be important for ethicists to solve but isn't important for AV engineers to solve. It's like asking a parent the question, "If both your kids were falling off a cliff at the exact same time and you could only save one of them, which one would you save." The parents says "well whichever one is closer to me." The ethicist say…

You absolutely cannot imagine a situation where a car will most likely cause damage but the driver (be that a computer or a human) can influence where it hits? And if it can be influenced, why wouldn't you want the least amount of damage vs some random amount of damage?

I'm not talking about Descartes and his all-powerful god that may fool him. "Which of your kids do you send to college if you don't have enough money to send both?" is a similar question, and that may be unthinkable and totally unrealistic for a SWE, but it's a pretty normal situation for lots of people.

Post reply on HN