I think trolley problems are mostly linguistic. Take this wording: "Oh no! A trolley is careening into a crowd! Should I try to turn it so it goes through the sparsest part of the crowd?" I think most people — by a wide margin — would say yes, because it's worded as still hitting the same thing, just hitting it in a way that does less damage, and we feel differently about that than hitting a different thing, "this guy" instead of "those guys".
Absurd Trolley Problems
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Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#582Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split sec…
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. By pulling the level, one is intentionally killing a person, to save five. In more general terms, a life is taken away for the greater good of society. A foundation of societies (modern ones, and I guess, some more than others) is that taking a life away has highly specific restrictions, which are us…
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Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#584I know there are flaws to my reasoning, but I can't shake the thought: How/Why those poor people ended on the track is more important to fix than to focus on the responsibility of the guy pulling the lever.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#585Most chilling for me was the majority who would divert the trolly away from a good citizen to kill a citizen who litters.
I think the takeaway lesson from this is don't litter or the public at large will literally kill you :D
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#586I know there are flaws to my reasoning, but I can't shake the thought: How/Why those poor people ended on the track is more important to fix than to focus on the responsibility of the guy pulling the lever.
But what if fixing the problem causes double the number of people to end up on a different track?
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#587This feels like a great introduction to the “Lizardman’s constant” ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and... ) > Lizardman’s Constant is an idea proposed by Scott Alexander that each poll always has about 4% weird answers. In one poll, 4% of Americans said that reptilian people do control our world and, in another 4% answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been decapitated?’
I selected kill people over have my Amazon packages being late, but then I felt guilty about it and answered seriously in the rest of them.
You fool, Amazon will refund you the cost because it's late and you'll get your package in a few days regardless. You threw away a lifetime of free Amazon stuff!
Well, until they ban you that is I guess.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#588Level 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…
I assumed that the trolly company would need to clean up the mess, with lots of construction equipment, and would replace the trolly, incurring the cost of building a new one. I guessed that the CO2 emissions from that result would dwarf the emissions of the extant one, so I left it alone.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#589Level 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…
I prefer the emissions and death rate of people living in their own mostly self-sustaining little village, within walking distance of everything they need, and not needing to constantly travel around to other people's villages.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#590This kind of highlights a subtle interactive design or user experience component of the Trolley problem. Part of the Trolley Problem is that the choice is between an action or inaction. But these problems, or the first one at least, have two buttons. So you're making a choice. Yeah, some might argue it's a technicality. But what if you put the Do Nothing choice on a timer? What if you made it an asynchronous "Problem…
I did the problems under the assumption that "pulling the lever" was an act, while doing nothing was not acting. Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
I was consistently in the "do nothing" camp.
Scored nearly 1k kills.
Because #FightThePremise