The same thing most people would do when presented with a Trolly Problem for real. Analysis paralysis, choose to do nothing, then cry softly every night for the rest of my life.
It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.
The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.
The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.
Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.
Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).
Way to stop the trolly problem dead in its tracks.
If the leading wheels are allowed to continue any interval down the original track, uncountably infinitely many people die.
Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.
Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)
I think that wad the premise, yeah.
Assuming that it takes some amount of energy to kill one person, and that the trolley doesn’t have an engine with infinite power, choosing the bottom track would save lives. The trolley would have to expend an infinite amount of energy to move any distance from the starting point, so it would just get stuck there while trying to crush the unimaginable amount of people bunched up in front of it.
But getting anywhere on the lower track will kill infinitely many people. You cannot kill finitely many people on the lower track. Well, unless you derail at exactly the first. On the upper track, a stop at any point will have killed only finitely many.
One person can only be on the spot for one number. As soon as more than one gets killed, that would mean that the trolley has traversed some distance, which implies that it has killed an infinite number of people. That is impossible in any finite timespan under the aforementioned assumption. Thus the only logical conclusion is that it gets stuck after the first person is killed, at the exact spot the first number is mapped to.
I guess there could also be a different solution when you look at the problem from a different angle. Treating infinity with this little mathematical care tends to cause paradoxes.
Shit man if there’s an infinite amount of people there must also be an infinite amount of track. So forget philosophy, I’m getting rich!
i’d ask for a second train.
Has anyone tried just asking the trolley to stop?
Or trying to understand its instead desire to kill?
In these scenarios the trolly is too close to stop before running the victums over.
Although in this particular time, having the trolly stop would save an infinite number of lives compared to the casulaites, which would actually help it stop fatser as bodies do not make good railroad tracks [citation needed].
Or stopped the person who keeps tying all these people to the trolley tracks?
If the tracks are scaled to the same unit (presumably one where one human width equals an infinitely small number), everyone in the top track would die of exposure before the trolley even reaches its first victim due to there being infinite distance between integer milestones, whereas everyone in the bottom track would be killed instantly due to any distance traveled having an infinite number of infinitesimals*. So I choose the bottom track to be merciful.
If the tracks don’t share the same scale then we don’t have enough information to make a judgment.
* Even though we already established the one human width rule. Could someone check my logic here? Infinities break my brain.
The existence of the bottom track would imply an infinite density of people, which would create a black hole and kill everyone involved, regardless of the trolley’s presence
That trolley is definitely stopping before it makes it through all those people on the bottom track.
I kill the trolley driver. The Dead Man button makes that the trolley stops.
That trolleys going to derail eventually. So the one with more people since they are tightly packed and it can’t build momentum.
But isn’t it more likely to derail if it gains momentum?
Not if the track is perfectly straight.
There are People lying on it, so it’s probably pretty uneven and bumpy, no?
Depends
“Eventually” on the densely packed track - even if almost instant - means uncountably many deaths. On the upper track, any eventual stop will result in only finitely many deaths.
Huh?
I take the square root of the negative trolley, then use my imaginary streetcar to establish a complex track so I can start killing in an additional dimension.
Some infinities are bigger than others but those are both the same sized infinity, ℵ₀. Same if you multi-track drift.
I was gonna say, these 2 infinities are the same. I think Vsauce made a second video on infinity to try and clarify it, but putting “more numbers” in between an infinite amount of numbers doesn’t make it larger
Pull it -1/12 of the way, causing the infinity to converge to a real number.
If you let the train go, it would appear to stop immediately at the first person (assuming it has any reaction whatsoever to hitting a person) as there are infinitely real numbers between any two real numbers you could come up with.
