Honestly I would. Like I wouldn’t hesitate to kill patient zero of a world ending disease.
But then it isn’t a world ending desease, you just killed somebody
The use of a time machine is implied in these situations
Kill the person who invented the trolley problem. It’s the only way to be sure
If you killed patient 0, then it wasn’t a world ending disease either.
The logic that nobody would ever die as long as nobody ever pulls falls through when you realize after 33 cycles you’re risking the entire human population on the whims of a stranger and that irrational actors will always exist.
It becomes not if but when.
Maybe a world ending disease is the cure… just looking around.
This guy is the perfect example of why we cannot trust somebody won’t pull the lever.
Youre right but for the wrong reason. Id pull it thinking it was going one way and it would go the other.
Cure for what? That’s a fascist argument. I am not accusing you. Just wanted to inform. I was intellectualizing like that once: if all humans die, life on the planet would thrive, species that go extinct wouldn’t be an issue we would only be seeing it as a product of the evolution of more biodiversity for sure…
Yet… A friend pointed out, that such disease is just a theorization and reality has shown that this kind of scenarios are lived in, for example, catastrophes. In those cases, the world ending event hits harder to the most vulnerable. Typically, the poorest fraction. Billionaire and other rich people will have resources, bunkers, time, and so on… They may even be saved.
And this is actually their agenda in, for example, climate change denialism and inaction.
That’s one reason why elites don’t care about the ecocide.
If the only people left alive were the cruelest, would they thrive? I know it seems unjust but we dont get upset that the dinosaurs once ruled the planet.
Personally, I think peoplle are corruptable. People arent inherently anything but circumstance plays a much bigger role. Essentially the most vulnerable people are just unlucky. Given the right luck they could only mirror the elite, not change their structure.
For the elite to see through the eyes of the homeless they would need to be made homeless and there is no other way.
Saying that people are corruptible doesn’t imply they are corrupt. Thankfully we live finite lives and plenty of us can make it to the end before we corrupt ourselves.
Given the right luck they could only mirror the elite, not change their structure.
This is quite literally pretending the Age of Enlightenment never existed. We can change structures and have throughout history.
I can be swayed but not until I see real results that can be applied in the current landscape.
232 is roughly four billion. We’ll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.
This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.
Just a little more and every single particle in the universe will be on the tracks, and what the fuck would happen if every particle in the universe was split in twain? Let’s assume it radiated outward from the center of the universe at the speed of light…
so umm if it was every particle, what would be hitting it?
Don’t say my mom.Your mom.
ಠ__ಠ
My god, we’ve figured it out.
Paging Mr. Munroe…
Do you know any of the people involved?
at the 33rd round you do
deleted by creator
Finally a life without shame.
Not quite. Round 33 will have 2^32 people, or a bit over half the population of Earth. Remember, round 1 has one person, 2^(0), not 2^(1).
How many rounds until the first switch operator is on the tracks?
deleted by creator
If you are number 32 the chance is 50/50
How do you know blahblahblah only knows one person? Are you that one person?
50/50
What’s wrong with you, don’t you know 4 billion people
Just keep doubling until max_int and segfault reality
As long as everyone doubles there will be no deaths.
Why do I get the feeling this kind of logic is used by modern day economists to justify inflation?
But I don’t know if I trust literally infinite people. It might be better to kill one. Because unless you believe all humans are 100% willing to never kill someone then you’re risking a number of deaths larger than 1. (Potentially much larger.)
No need to trust infinite people. You just need to get past 33 forks before you run out of people to operate the switch or to be tied to the tracks.
It’s a thought experiment though, in the magical world where we could have all of humanity tied to rail road tracks by an omnipotent being, I don’t assume there to be a finite number of people.
Would they not simply be trapped tied to the tracks until a nonexistent remaining person makes a choice? Also you’re trusting that 32nd person not to kill just under 5 billion people.
The last person does not get to choose, 5 billion people just die
When we are all strapped to the tracks, who will decide?
Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.
if the choice is always the same and it goes forever, then always choosing to pass means no one gets killed? unless you get to a little shit who breaks the trend
Yes. But it keeps going forever, and eventually some chaotic-evil person will kill choose to kill 2^43 people, which is a thousand times the world’s population.
You didn’t kill that person, the person who invented the problem did.
Philosophy is easy.
Maybe there is nobody tied up after the third split, nobody explicitly stated it continues!
How fast is the train going can I make it to the person who’s tied down and lay with them
You’ll eventually have to include alien life. What a great way to see if aliens exist!
This is also Thanos wet dream come true. Keep racking up the “pass”!
After person 33 there won’t be any more humans to tie to the rails
Edit: which was pointed more subtly by OP in the title
So if you the 32, you choice is to kill hall of the humanity, or be killed by the next person Why does it feel like this is his is the choice we all have ?
no, this means you already saved half. unless someone was untying the people from previous track then re-tie them again to be killed?
Maybe it’s a loop?
Everyone just doubles it and we’re good
That’s kind of how it feels like living in the modern age to be honest. We’re just doubling it until somebody decides to pull the lever.
What could possibly go wrong?
Daddy needs a new pair of multi-billion dollar AI startup Equity!
I’d get it done and over with. I would resent myself forever, and accept any punishment for it, but it’s better than waiting to see if someone wants to decide to kill off half the world later on. Would be even easier if I could take the first persons spot on the tracks so there only has to be one messed up person rather than two.
In recognition of your heroic sacrifice, I volunteer to pull the switch to send the train to run over you.
What happens if you are both to be killed and must flip the switch?
I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn’t go on infinitely. Hear me out:
When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is
0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let’s consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they’d have to pull the lever with likelihoodxso thatx * 2^33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1which would lead tox = 1/2^33or aboutx≈0.0000000001. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I’d guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above1/2^33, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is ‘only’ one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(
I am not seeing it. Are you saying the last person chooses between killing nobody and killing the entire population? Also, what about the intermediary likelihoods of pulling the lever?
That was my assumption, yes. Because the last person would have the entire population on the tracks, and you can’t really continue after that.
I neglected the intermediary likelihoods, because that calculation was too long for wolfram alpha, but I have since managed to get it working, and the conclusion is not significantly different. The expected number of deaths skyrockets, even if the chance of pulling the lever is tiny for every person.
Got it! So you’re saying that the last choice is between 233 or 0 and the last guy has a probably x of pulling the lever and killing everyone (therefore a (1-x) probability of killing nobody).
So, even if it’s guaranteed that nobody along the way pulls the lever (the best case scenario if we want 0 dead), the expected value at the last branch is x · 233 + (1-x) · 0. And the only way this is less than 1 is if x < 1 / 233, which is an absurdly tiny probability.
If we also consider the intermediary probabilities, this already tiny probability threshold of 1 / 233 of killing nobody gets SMALLER because we’re allowing more chances for killing way more than 1 person along the way.
That’s exactly right, you got it!
The intermediary probabilities make it even worse, yes! But the overall probability is already ridiculously tiny, so I don’t think it changes the conclusion by a lot.
To be honest, I’ve kept thinking of this branching stuff for the past few days lol.
They choose between half the whole population and the whole population (very roughly as it aligns alongside exponents of 2)
That’s what the meme is. But the user’s calculation multiplies 1-x by 0, not 1-x by half the population. Or by the future expected value.
Wait, we were supposed to figure out how to get less ppl ran over?
Reading this analysis, I think it’s all but guaranteed that the person at the switch on the last step is Davros.
