If you factor in the legal implications, the trolley problem becomes trivial. Do nothing. I'm not qualified nor allowed to operate train infrastructure and the legal consequences will become worse if someone dies because of something I did.
Absurd Trolley Problems
191–200 of 951 posts
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#192Level 20 was weird. It was a choice between letting a trolley run as normal ("emits CO2, kills 3 people in accidents over 30 years") or running it into a brick wall and decommissioning it. For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit? What about the emissions and death rate when everyone switches to cars instead? Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a questio…
Right, you can run it in to a brick wall, ending the CO2 emissions and its usefulness as part of a transit network, and also, of course, depriving its owner of a valuable asset (the trolley)
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#193The measured side of me always wants to err on the side of inaction.
The one about life savings is a difficult one and I think at a distance without the peer pressure or emotional bias of a high pressure situation I would certainly choose to save the life savings.
More interesting I think would be a question involving family members. How many people do you kill (by pulling the lever) to save a parent, or your child?
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#194My favorite variation is: A trolley is heading towards a line of people corresponding to every natural number. You can pull a lever and divert the trolley towards a line of people corresponding to every real number between 0 and 1. What do you do?
Mathematics [hey-o]
But actually, if you choose "pull the lever" after having done the maths, then you are probably a misanthrope. Either that or you believe very strongly in the theory that if you do nothing you're not involved. But really, you're just a misanthrope.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#195Kill count: 84 Apparently I solved philosophy? Im gonna assume that title stays the same for everyone lol. So, explanation for why so high. Simply put; I don't believe 5 people really got tied to those rails each time. They are in on it somehow. If so, that is sick and twisted they would tie someone else to the rails purposely. So they deserve the trolley instead. Now on the chance that they really are all innocent;…
Not a high total at all. I scored 97. If there is a hell, I guess I'll be going there.
Wow! Like GP I got only 83. I must have messed up few things here and there!
My rationale was to result to default situations because that's how most of things work. Most of the general events are resulting to average behavior. This makes more sense when you realize world moves without your presence.
So by defaulting, I am ignoring my presence and seeing the result on what happens without me. It was fun decision to make.
In one case, I genuinely saved 5 sentient robots over a human.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#196I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life. When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments. The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.
It's not that unrealistic. Imagine driving a car and a kid runs onto the street. You can swerve onto the sidewalk but there are people walking there you'd hit. The question if you'd take action to save someone to (potentially) kill someone else is interesting. And it has been discussed in the context of self driving vehicles. But from all I remember, the outcome always was that an AI should never actively make a deci…
In real life, though, you never have either perfect information about whether your action (or inaction) will have your intended consequences nor do you have the time for complete/rational analysis.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#197My favorite variation is: A trolley is heading towards a line of people corresponding to every natural number. You can pull a lever and divert the trolley towards a line of people corresponding to every real number between 0 and 1. What do you do?
hmmm.. i'm not a very mathy person but seems like an interesting question.
Aren't they both just infinite? There's no such thing as a bigger inifinite?
thinking about it out loud here tho I would say that every natural number is a BIGGER number than every real number between 0-1 because, well, 2 is bigger than 0-1.
but then again since you said corresponding to every number.... 0.000000to infiniitiy -1 is a number in itself, so, you have infinite numbers, along an infinite number of 'places'.
Final Answer, you save lives by natural numbers, because real numbers have an infinite number of 'digits' per 'places' & those 'Places' are equal to all natural numbers.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#198I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life. When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments. The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.
The original trolly problem showed that people find it less repressible to kill people when no action is taken. It's presented both ways. "Pull the lever and kill five to save one" and "pull the lever to kill one and save five". You'd think that people would answer to kill one person in both cases, but it turns out people are biased against taking action (pulling the lever) regardless of how you word it, and so when…
I would argue the people’s choices are appropriate.
In real life you never get perfect information, so doing nothing as opposed to pulling represents the humans uncertainty of the parameters in the scenario.
“First do no harm”.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#199>Oh no! Due to a construction error, a trolley is stuck in an eternal loop. If you pull the lever the trolley will explode, and if you don't the trolley and it's passengers will go in circles for eternity. What do you do? 50% of people pull the lever?!? I hereby declare that if I'm ever going to be stuck in a trolley for my entire life, I do NOT want the lever pulled. Toss me a smartphone charger and my life wouldn't…
Would your answer change if you were stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity, rather than just the remainder of your biological life?
That depends - am I bored for eternity, or is there interesting stuff for me to do?
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#200I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life. When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments. The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.
It's not that unrealistic. Imagine driving a car and a kid runs onto the street. You can swerve onto the sidewalk but there are people walking there you'd hit. The question if you'd take action to save someone to (potentially) kill someone else is interesting. And it has been discussed in the context of self driving vehicles. But from all I remember, the outcome always was that an AI should never actively make a deci…
> You can swerve onto the sidewalk but
I feel like that's not realistic either—when you encounter these sorts of situations in real life, you don't really make a thought out choice because it happens so fast. People swerve and crash into trees trying to avoid rabbits, it's not a reasoned thing.
These problems do, however, come up fairly often in so many other areas. Cryptography is probably one near and dear to many people's hearts here—supporting cryptography directly saves many lives (journalists in totalitarian regimes, people in abusive relationships, the general wellbeing of people being able to communicate securely for a myriad of industrial purposes, etc.) but it also, to a lesser degree, directly leads to some deaths (terrorists are able to organize and hide their plans). Do you spend your life developing more powerful cryptographic algorithms knowing that it will have some small negative outcome that your work is partially responsible for? Or do you do nothing at all and have a larger number of people suffer as a result of you not having produced a work.