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Absurd Trolley Problems

neal.fun

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Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#621

Post by WillDaSilva »

ptsneves wrote: post #362
UberFly wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only to decide to recommission them in many places, increasing the heat-attack rate for those trying to get to work on time through the 6 year long construction zones.

From my point of view trams have no advantages over buses. On the other hand they need lots of special purpose infrastructure and often condition road traffic rules terribly, like forcing traffic lights instead of roundabouts. Actually I am open to hear the advantages of trams.

They are far more comfortable than buses. Larger too. If you rely on public transit, then your city switching to trams for the highest frequency routes can be a significant quality of life improvement for you and the many thousands of others who will use them every day.

That isn't their only advantage, but it's one which is often overlooked.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#622

Post by addandsubtract »

soco wrote: post #380
tmlb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would your answer change if you were stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity, rather than just the remainder of your biological life?

Does the trolley have toilets?

No, but it also doesn't have food or drinks. So where you're going, you won't need toilets.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#623

Post by kortex »

I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws:

- whenever possible, do no harm

- do not let harm occur due to inaction

- when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate

- higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)

- deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)

It kind of really brings to bear how much of a thematic device the 3 laws are. There's no way to make them congruent with actual, messy, real-world situations. Also why the whole "self-driving car trolly problem" is a non-issue - there will never be a situation where the "AI" has nice neat consequences and a binary choice laid out in front of it. It's always going to be some collection of "preserve life as best as possible" heuristics.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#624

Post by Gordonjcp »

McBeige wrote: post #520
Gordonjcp wrote: post #393

I couldn't get past the first one because it didn't have the correct response.

Multi track drifting to maximize kill count?

Minimise ;-) Let the front wheels of the trolley roll over the points and then switch them, so at best it binds up and at worst derails.

Of course it might derail and fall on the people, but at least you tried.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#625

Post by mrjin »

The whole thing was nonsense. I never think any individual should be in the position of deciding who to live and who to die. The common fallacy would be something like let's pull the lever to save 5 by killing 1. So the question would then be how can anyone be sure it would be worthy to save the 5 by killing 1? To me, life is not a number, unless someone involved means something to me, I'll let it be.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#626

Post by thejohnconway »

kortex wrote: post #623

I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws: - whenever possible, do no harm - do not let harm occur due to inaction - when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters) - deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions) It kind of really bring…

> - whenever possible, do no harm

> - do not let harm occur due to inaction

Trolley problems, of course, are designed to bring these into direct conflict.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#627

Post by Etherlord87 »

capableweb wrote: post #540
cortic wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [I] would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. This is a quite disturbing statement. So many psychopathic examples; If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients? Or a researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later... In fact we could simplify your statement furt…

> This is a quite disturbing statement So it is to be human :) > If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people No. > researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts. But "inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy pe…

> If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients?

> > No.

Why not? It's clearly a different approach than your original to turn the lever to kill a person in order to save 5 other people. So what changed?

> researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later

> > If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts.

So you're willing to turn the lever to save 5 people because it's seemingly obvious those 5 people will therefore be saved (reasonable to me) and you see no problem killing 1 person, to reference your previous post, not only you would do that, you would easily break the law to do that! However, when it comes to killing thousands, in order to save millions, so the "net gain" is now not 4 but millions, and it's no longer the same order of magnitude, but it's a difference of 3 orders of magnitude, even if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts, you will only "think about it"???? :D

> It all depends on the context

It seems to me you don't care about the context when it comes to killing one person, but once the stakes are higher and involve thousands, you hesitate. So I too find it disturbing, not just that you don't want to treat people individually and just consider the outcome of the trolley dilemma as +4 gain, rather than killing to save, but also the automatic disregard to individual rights creates a portrait of a person very dangerous to the society.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#628

Post by HenriTEL »

paganel wrote: post #533
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…

I hope not all the people took this seriously, hence (probably) some of the answers. I knew I responded with "do nothing" to 100% of the questions, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe (and if that good person had been that good in real life then he/she wouldn't have ended up in front of an incoming trolley while the bad person was tied down on the other, "take action", line).

Judge: 20 years of prison for not helping people in danger. You: Hey, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe! Duh

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#629

Post by addandsubtract »

magnio wrote: post #181
cowtools wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the difference is that one is an emergency and the other is a long-term sytematic issue. The cost of the lives of 5 first-world people in terms of economic productivity is like an order of magnitude greater than my savings.

What did you answer for problem 6, where a rich man offers you money to pull the lever and kill someone else? Presumably, a rich man is likely to have more economic productivity than a random person.

A life is a life, in that situation. But one of them is giving me money. So without further information, I'll take the money and save theirs.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#630

Post by layer8 »

gfiorav wrote: post #607
layer8 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if fixing the problem causes double the number of people to end up on a different track?

... then you didn't fix it? My reasoning is: say that bad city design leads to a lot of pedestrians about to be struck by cars in intersections. Does it really make sense to focus on the drivers?

The premise of trolley problems is that you can’t generally prevent situations where you have to choose between two evils. But we’d like to have morality rules that allow us to make the “right choice” in any situation. It turns out that it is really hard, if not impossible, to have such a rule system that (a) allows to derive the “correct” choice, that (b) is logically consistent, and that (c) people agree with all its results.
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