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Absurd Trolley Problems

neal.fun

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Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#441

Post by perlgeek »

everfree wrote: post #98

I'm surprised to see the popular answer to Question 3. > Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your life savings will be destroyed. What do you do? Over 70% chose to pull the lever and destroy their life savings. People die of preventable causes in developing countries today. By choosing not to donate your life savings today to help them, you ar…

By that logic, somebody defrauding a charity out of $4500 should be punished roughly the same as a homicide.

(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#442

Post by Hamuko »

Markoff wrote: post #345
ShortStretto wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think I got that far but the thoguht process is not hard to follow. One person is gonna die either way so it might as well be the "better" option.

Except it's not up to you to decide which of these two will die, both lives are equal and you must perform action to kill the littering guy, if you do nothing someone will die anyway, it just won't be the littering guy.

>Except it's not up to you to decide which of these two will die

I'm standing next to the track switcher, so I'd argue that it is.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#443

Post by SahAssar »

JonathanFly wrote: post #21

>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…

I reasoned that the trolley is essentially just a scaled down earth, and plenty of people feel perfectly fine living their lives confined to that looping prison.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#445

Post by maest »

strken wrote: post #270
paxys wrote: post #12

Level 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…

If you included "the trolley actually exists in a realistic world and is part of a public transport network" then sure, I won't decommission it, but trolley problems are weird zero-context questions about trade-offs and I assume they fully describe the consequences of choosing each leg when answering. It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical construct…

But it's problematic to assume these problems are in a 0-context vacuum because that would mean your actions don't actually have consequences. If the world ends immediately at the end of the experiment, then your choices in the experiment don't have any meaning, imo.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#446

Post by galfarragem »

_nalply wrote: post #395
galfarragem wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate trolley problem is one where you pull the lever to save a larger amount of people that have chosen a unsafe area while punishing a smaller amount of people that have chosen a safe area (unless someone pulls the lever)... Ultimately this is politics . Morality is not math, but, as always, things might be more foggy: lack of free choice and a really skewed ratio (e.g. punish one to save 100 million) may te…

Please be explicit. Do you mean something like insurance: a small amount of people has insurance but someone decided to insure even the people who haven't paid insurance? In that case it's clear that I won't pull the lever. It's not a question of life and death, and because I am not sure whether pulling the lever helps preventing lots of damage, I won't do anything, especially because perhaps it's just a vague and ab…

An extreme example:

Government builds a dam. It clearly recommends people to not build in front of the dam, it may crack and a flood would be a tragedy. 100K people ignore it and slowly houses appear: it's cheaper, better land, views, etc. 1K people choose to comply with Government and build in a safe but ugly and infertile area. One day, suddenly, a huge crack appears. At the last minute engineers discovered "a lever" to flood the safe area instead and save 99K lives. They don't have time to evacuate anybody. Should they pull the lever?

By limits of morality I mean:

- Free choice: if the people living in the unsafe area didn't understand the danger or didn't have another choice but to live there?

- Skewed ratio: if only 10 people lived in the safe area and 1 million had chosen to live in the unsafe area?

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#447

Post by epgui »

sh4rks wrote: post #278
epgui wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such a sad perspective. I hope you have the chance to have the life experience in the future to make you think otherwise.

Life experience that would make me want to want to die if I was in this scenario? I sincerely hope I don't experience anything like that. But I'm glad that innocent-minded people like you exist. Here's a question, if you had the choice between killing me or yourself, who would you choose?

I would not let myself die to save one person, but I certainly might to save two people. (There are lots of assumptions that go into this, of course.)

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#449

Post by joshschreuder »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #360
robocat wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Hook up the trolley to a massive generator set and get free energy. Use the free energy to solve global warming and the energy crisis. * Study the science behind the infinitely reliable trolley. If the science is tractorable then humanity wins. * How are the people prevented from leaving the trolley? New science? * Is the trolley just a thought experiment? Then we can think about other solutions. * Is the trolley s…

If they're stuck in a loop for eternity, implying they'll never die, does it mean the trolley is going at light speed?

I interpreted it as the passengers would go round in circles for eternity, but not necessarily living passengers. I assumed they would die of hunger and dehydration which seemed less humane than instantaneous death by explosion.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#450

Post by drom55 »

_nalply wrote: post #319

This was quite easy for me. The principles: 1. Only pull the lever if you are sure. With an action you assume responsibility for the outcome. 2. Don't believe everything what you see or are told. If you doubt do nothing. Imagine you killed many people because you have been lied to and pulled the lever. In this case it is better you did nothing. 3. An action of yours might kill someone. This is a very heavy responsibi…

> and finally that I "have solved philosophy"

I guess it displays that to everyone, I chose to kill someone to get my amazon package sooner, I don't think that's solving philosophy

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