Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
It's a little more complicated than that. You have to be summing everyone who is still tied to all the previous tracks. It needs to be a geometric sum formula.
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you're actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
It's not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it's still barely even a choice.
"Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?"
If you can't choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it's my kid versus a billion? That's not a choice, that's just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
So a more interesting dilemma would have been "would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.". Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes "do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?". Even more interestingly "limiting the damage now" makes you the "psycho" in that sense...
ok buts let's go two steps further here. The people who would die if the person at the switch decided to kill are already bound to the tracks, as can be seen in the image. Now, if the choice is "Kill 16 billion people or double it and give it to the next person", the person who's supposed to flip the switch is ALREADY on the tracks, unable to move.
So the real question is, what is the default position?
Eventually there might also be a track with no people on it so postponing the dilemma becomes much better than at least 1 death. But there is no way of knowing what the future dilemma might be.
That leads to another interesting split path. Maybe it’s best to just kill the one right away. Assuming this goes on forever, it’s basically inevitable that someone somehow will end up killing an obscene number of people eventually. But maybe it’d be like nukes, and eventually reach a point where flipping the lever is just mutually assured destruction, and no one would ever actually do that
Assuming of course that it goes on forever. Which admittedly seems like what one is intended to think, but the graphic doesn't actually show or state that, and realistically, if actually given this scenario, it shouldn't, because eventually some limit will be encountered that makes it impossible for the problem to physically exist (like running out of people to tie to the tracks, running out of space for them, having such a large amount of stuff in one space that it undergoes gravitational collapse, the finite size of the observable universe making fitting an infinite dilemma impossible, etc.)
But what happens when you get to, say, the 34th person, and there are 2^33 people tied up, more than there are living humans in the world? Pass the buck, break the simulation, save the world
People always miss the bigger picture with these things. Why do these trolleys' brakes keep failing? Is it a design flaw in the braking system? Is the maintenance crew severely underfunded? Is it a slippage problem due to improper rail maintenance? It's a shame we can't even organize a work stoppage to sort this out since congress blocked the trolley union from striking...
this is not a purely theoretical question. in practice, autonomous vehicles face exactly this dilemma. or rather the manufacturers of the vehicles who have to set the specifications
I forget where it was from but years ago I found an online survey on autonomous cars and their decision making from a university. It was all about deciding to swerve or not in a collision. All kinds of difficult encounters like do you hit the barrier and kill the passenger or swerve and kill the old lady? Do you hit thin person or serve and hit the heavier person?
I've never seen a survey drill down into biases quite so deeply.
From what I've seen of real world examples, not "what if the car had 5 cats in it and the person on the crosswalk had a stroller full of 6 cat, swerve into a barricade?", telsa cars just release control of the autonomous controls to the person behind the wheel a few seconds before impact so the driver is fully liable.
I think with this scenario it's indirectly caused by you. Either you 'press a button,' directly resulting in the death of a specific individual, or another person is given the same scenario but the button directly causes double the number of deaths if they press it.
Depends on if you're happy with someone else killing lot more people, or if you want to kill someone yourself.
Assuming this goes to infinity, the reasonable thing to do is to kill one person to prevent someone else killing a lot of people. But that would make you directly responsible for killing that person.
Switch the track from the bottom to the top as the train is half way over the switch, causing the train to drift across both rails hitting all three tied up people and the second switch operator.
Attempting to subvert the thought experiment only makes things worse. The trolley is full of child prodigies, all future geniuses that will cure cancer and solve the world's problems. By sticking the lever halfway you kill all of them. The only way to save the child prodigies is to choose, left or right.
You couldn't even bother putting in adult scientists that have already helped the world. It's a hypothetical scenario, you know, you can put in anyone you want. So I'm putting the child prodigies to a test by having the save themselves from the half-lever. Should be relatively easy for them.
You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person
Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you'd need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.
You don't even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.
It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.
Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it's them doing it. I'm invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.
Idk which moral system you operate under, but I'm concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don't follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don't really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).
My moral system somehow does not chose to kill people through action against an imagined threat and is therefore objectively superior as is it not susceptible to hostile memetic manipulation (Molloch, Pascal's wager, Pascal's mugging, basilisks, social hysteria etc.) and is capable of escaping false choices and other contrived scenarios, breaking premise and the rules of the game as needed to obtain the desired outcome.
I think everyone here is missing the real answer. If you look at the picture you will notice a third option, there are track switches, two of them, you can bypass the people tied to the track, then kill the monster forcing you to kill for no reason.
Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
At some people you will run out of people to tie to the tracks.
How many branches is that going to take? Just out of interest.
Only 32
math checks out. log2(8 billion) ~= 32.9
It's a little more complicated than that. You have to be summing everyone who is still tied to all the previous tracks. It needs to be a geometric sum formula.
You could just move them over whenever someone decides to double it up. That way the person that was going to die alone is doomed to die anyway. 😂
I wonder if we do stack it till every human is tied to the track whos at the lever?
Does the train/AI decide?
It'll just be one fewer junctions. 2^n is always one more than the sum of 2^1+...2^(n-1)
I think you have to include 2^0 for that to be true?
e.g 2^0 = 1, 2^1 = 2 2^0 + 2^1 = 1 + 2 = 3, 2^2 = 4 … 7, 8 15,16 31, 32 etc.
2^33 is approximately 8.5 billion, which is roughly the population of the world.
So the 32nd person decides to either kill half of humanity and end the scenario, or give someone the power to end human kind...
🤣
A later choice of nobody on each track would be ideal. Even a psycho at the switch would be unable to kill.
I’d tie myself to the tracks tbh gotta end this cycle of suffering somehow 😩
This is really the only answer. The only thing that makes it "hard" is having to face the brutality of moral calculus
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
The thing to do is kill now even if it's thousands. Because it's only going to get worse.
The best time to kill was the first trolly. The second best time to kill is now.
Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you're actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
Very interesting one!
It's not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it's still barely even a choice.
"Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?"
If you can't choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it's my kid versus a billion? That's not a choice, that's just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
So a more interesting dilemma would have been "would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.". Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes "do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?". Even more interestingly "limiting the damage now" makes you the "psycho" in that sense...
The fact of the game never ending is what made the choice too easy, you're right.
EDITED
For this study you want sociopathy, not psychopathy. I can report from my wasted psych degree that sociopathy occurs in 1-2% of the population.
Binary probability tells us that if you repeat a 1% chance test 32 times, you have a 95% chance of never seeing it.
Don't pull the lever. Sorry for the ninja edit, I misread something.
ok buts let's go two steps further here. The people who would die if the person at the switch decided to kill are already bound to the tracks, as can be seen in the image. Now, if the choice is "Kill 16 billion people or double it and give it to the next person", the person who's supposed to flip the switch is ALREADY on the tracks, unable to move.
So the real question is, what is the default position?
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be
Ok, let's take a finite but very long track, such as a million long and instead of having the amount of people on the track double it increments.
Do you trust 999 thousand other people to not decide to pull the lever? Remember each one has to also trust all the people in front of them
Eventually there might also be a track with no people on it so postponing the dilemma becomes much better than at least 1 death. But there is no way of knowing what the future dilemma might be.
That leads to another interesting split path. Maybe it’s best to just kill the one right away. Assuming this goes on forever, it’s basically inevitable that someone somehow will end up killing an obscene number of people eventually. But maybe it’d be like nukes, and eventually reach a point where flipping the lever is just mutually assured destruction, and no one would ever actually do that
Yeah so it would be tough to decide if you wanted to be at an early, middle, or late junction. All depends on how to people on the switches think.
Assuming of course that it goes on forever. Which admittedly seems like what one is intended to think, but the graphic doesn't actually show or state that, and realistically, if actually given this scenario, it shouldn't, because eventually some limit will be encountered that makes it impossible for the problem to physically exist (like running out of people to tie to the tracks, running out of space for them, having such a large amount of stuff in one space that it undergoes gravitational collapse, the finite size of the observable universe making fitting an infinite dilemma impossible, etc.)
It's a bad dilemma because if we repeat the process we only end up with one deranged lunatic.
You gotta double it until it overflows to negatives, then you end up reviving billions of people!
Then you end up killing more because of massive famine 💀
l'Mao
And so you end up driving up food and housing demand, with no guarantee that the revived population can provide to the supply side. :P
Billions of zombies.... that then feast on the living. This could be the worst outcome.
Year 2k38, right?
Slow down Jod.
Although the top comment is a very good answer, this is definitely the best one
If I must kill 1 person or cause even more death, I suppose I'd kill the person responsible for this scenario.
Successfully explained climate change
Gotta find the person tying everyone to these tracks and take them out
So what you're saying is you'd actively kill someone in order to prevent several passive deaths. Where have I heard that before?
That's the joke.jpg
Continuously double it so that the trolley has as much room as it needs to brake to a complete halt, therefore killing 0 people.
The real questions are, "Who is fueling and piloting the trolly, and can we kill them?"
Math-wise, it won't take long until they are tied to the track with us and everyone else.
So you're saying they'd be.... exponentially fucked?
Jesus took the wheel
Seems like exactly what politicians are doing. Pass the problems along to the next one.
The Boomer Method
Easy. I'd just step in front of the train.
Kill 1 person. I feel it would be cowardly to pass the buck and risk killing 2.
Lest they do the same and kill 4, etc.
But what happens when you get to, say, the 34th person, and there are 2^33 people tied up, more than there are living humans in the world? Pass the buck, break the simulation, save the world
I've never been much of a gambler. I'll stick with my one kill.
People always miss the bigger picture with these things. Why do these trolleys' brakes keep failing? Is it a design flaw in the braking system? Is the maintenance crew severely underfunded? Is it a slippage problem due to improper rail maintenance? It's a shame we can't even organize a work stoppage to sort this out since congress blocked the trolley union from striking...
Considering someone is tied to the tracks I’d assume it’s sabotaged
this is not a purely theoretical question. in practice, autonomous vehicles face exactly this dilemma. or rather the manufacturers of the vehicles who have to set the specifications
I forget where it was from but years ago I found an online survey on autonomous cars and their decision making from a university. It was all about deciding to swerve or not in a collision. All kinds of difficult encounters like do you hit the barrier and kill the passenger or swerve and kill the old lady? Do you hit thin person or serve and hit the heavier person?
I've never seen a survey drill down into biases quite so deeply.
Easy. Prioritize who is saved based on social credit score.
I did this as a part of our ethics discussion.
My eventual answer was you always kill the non-driver as no one would ever buy a car that will kill them over someone else.
From what I've seen of real world examples, not "what if the car had 5 cats in it and the person on the crosswalk had a stroller full of 6 cat, swerve into a barricade?", telsa cars just release control of the autonomous controls to the person behind the wheel a few seconds before impact so the driver is fully liable.
Hey, once we reach a psychopath that is problem solved
Addressing Climate Change.
Sunk cost fallacy, just pull it on one person instead of doubling the potential deaths and giving up control over when it will happen.
I'd try to talk to the person on the track to see if they were an asshole and decide from there.
I say let it go for 33 doublings (2^33 people), and then decide.
As the famous Double Down Domino would say, "I'm doublin' down!"
How OSHA violations are born.
So how does that killing thing work, doing it by yourself or just thinking and the person dies?
I think with this scenario it's indirectly caused by you. Either you 'press a button,' directly resulting in the death of a specific individual, or another person is given the same scenario but the button directly causes double the number of deaths if they press it.
Also interesting: What would you choose here if you were an evil psychopath? (Asking for an acquaintance.)
Depends on if you're happy with someone else killing lot more people, or if you want to kill someone yourself.
Assuming this goes to infinity, the reasonable thing to do is to kill one person to prevent someone else killing a lot of people. But that would make you directly responsible for killing that person.
Isn't redirecting making you directly responsible for minimum of 2 deaths?
No, that's someone else's choice to kill.
Switch the track from the bottom to the top as the train is half way over the switch, causing the train to drift across both rails hitting all three tied up people and the second switch operator.
Double it. Then the other guy will double it, and so on. Infinite loop = no deaths.
And then there's some psycho on round 34 who kills all 8 billion people alive on earth.
Lever half way and it crashes.
Might hit the 2nd guy with a lever and the peeps behind him depending on speed.
It might. Still better odds.
Attempting to subvert the thought experiment only makes things worse. The trolley is full of child prodigies, all future geniuses that will cure cancer and solve the world's problems. By sticking the lever halfway you kill all of them. The only way to save the child prodigies is to choose, left or right.
You couldn't even bother putting in adult scientists that have already helped the world. It's a hypothetical scenario, you know, you can put in anyone you want. So I'm putting the child prodigies to a test by having the save themselves from the half-lever. Should be relatively easy for them.
Welcome to climate policy.
That implies that if nobody tries to stop climate change, it'll never destroy the world.
You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person
Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you'd need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.
You don't even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.
It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.
It's always "double it" Anyone after 34 flips the kill all humans, that's their fault not yours
Why do you care whose fault it is? You'd want to minimise human deaths, not win a blame game.
Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.
Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it's them doing it. I'm invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.
Idk which moral system you operate under, but I'm concerned with minimising human suffering. That implies hitting kill because chances of a mass murderer are too high not to. You also don't follow traffic laws to a t, but exercise caution because you don't really care whose fault it ends up being, you want to avoid bad outcomes (in this case the extinction of humankind).
My moral system somehow does not chose to kill people through action against an imagined threat and is therefore objectively superior as is it not susceptible to hostile memetic manipulation (Molloch, Pascal's wager, Pascal's mugging, basilisks, social hysteria etc.) and is capable of escaping false choices and other contrived scenarios, breaking premise and the rules of the game as needed to obtain the desired outcome.
I think everyone here is missing the real answer. If you look at the picture you will notice a third option, there are track switches, two of them, you can bypass the people tied to the track, then kill the monster forcing you to kill for no reason.
Can I move the rails to kill them all and then circle around and hit me?
The zoomer way
For legal purposes this is a joke