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- cross-posted to:
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The top choice is better, because if you add up all the people killed, an infinite sum of integers, the answer is -1/12. Way less suffering than the second track.
That’s if you kill 1 + 2 + 3 + … people. But here you’re killing 1 + 1 + 1 + … people, which is just infinite.
1 + (1 + 1) + (1 + 1 + 1)… So -1/12 is still undefeated.
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I prefer to kill countably infinite people.That’s just Pascal’s Wager with extra steps.
omelas type beat
They won’t get used to it because they keep dying and thus are incapable of holding on to any memory, experience or change.
But if they are reborn with no context of what neither contentness nor suffering is, what are they even feeling?
I assume they still have standard human facilities at minimum, and babies can certainly feel pain
But is a baby crying more meaningful than a full adult with decades of experience?
*backs the hell out of thread out of sheer guilt*
If there’s countably infinite people on the track with nonzero space between them, the probability that any given person is any given finite distance from the trolley is 0, so practically no one gets run over.
All these different, more extreme variations of the trolly problem seem to be missing the point of it. It’s not about the deaths, it’s about making the decision to be responsible for those deaths.
To rearrange the premise. If the person was a doctor, and three patients (tied to track A, current path) needed organs to live, and only one person, (Track B) had those organs, should the doctor make the conscious decision to sacrifice the person on track B to save the others?
The people on track A will die without the organs, that is already happening, and the doctor has no involvement in those deaths. However, by getting involved and consciously sacrificing the person on track B, the doctor has now committed murder and taken responsibility for the situation.
And this is why I always choose not to get involved! I’m not responsible for your predicament, and I will not choose to be!
What if it was 1 million people vs 1 person?
If that 1 person had a minigun, they could probably hold out a few good moments before they get swarmed
I love the missing contextual steps in going from 1 person tied to a train track, to that person seemingly holding off a rapidly approaching train with a minigun while 1 million people attempt to escape.
Oh I was talking about a bloodbath between 1 person vs 1 million people, but your interpretation is far more nobler and guarantees a heroic victory for everyone.
I think you just solved the trolley problem.
This is just The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas with trolleys.
simple answer: loop.
while the train is circling, you can start untying the people as they are resurrected. the real question is whether the train is slow enough to get the time to untie those people between each pass.I’d choose the circle… you’re telling me there’s not enough time to unbind the reincarnating demigods from the track to end the suffering?
Or is the real problem that we need to keep them there to prevent them from becoming unkillable menaces to society?
Simple answer let the first train over 1+1+1+1… Track and then bring another train to send over the loop
