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.
Multi-axis drifting!?!?
Deja Vu!
Aw, yeah, that’s sick! I also choose this option.
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).
I’m no expert, but I’d expect such a slow moving trolley to eventually derail itself anyway on account of all the corpses
Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.
I think you just passed the Trolley version of the Kobayashi Maru. Well done.
Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.
Way to stop the trolly problem dead in its tracks.
dead
ha
OR… if you can keep the wheels spinning really fast, you could “drift” the trolly, keeping a set of wheels on each track and kill everyone on both tracks into infinity.
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.
I would question the ability to line people up on a railroad track such that they have a 1:1 correspondence with the real numbers.
It’s totally doable because they are real people.
Yeah, for any length of track, you would need to stack infinite people…
If we are already dealing with infinities of peoples then we can deal just as easily with infinities of tracks. I just struggle to see what kind of power source the trolly uses to plow through that many people.
It’s powered by screams.
The blood of the innocent also works
We have nuclear subs, why not nuclear trollies?
Nuclear lasts a long time, but it’s nothing compared to infinity.
Arbitrary precision engineering
just use a well ordering of the reals and you should be fine
The real question for me is what unit of distance would be used for the integer representation… It could take 1 meter, 1 Km, 1 Au, or even 1 Infinity to represent the distance between every person and the next. Also, are we using a linear or logarithmic scale?
This is not to mention the lack of info on how fast the train is going, and whether or not it’s accelerating.
Has anyone tried just asking the trolley to stop?
Or stopped the person who keeps tying all these people to the trolley tracks?
Or trying to understand its innate desire to kill?
It has tasted blood, it’s too late to reason with it
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].
It is my understanding that the trolley just wants to go forward. It doesn’t care whether it kills people or not.
Therefore, make the trolley go in circles.
Or in reverse
Sorry, that’s only an option of you have a Pro subscription.
At any point in time, a finite amount of time has passed, and the trolley has killed a finite amount of people. The correct track is the one that, at any given time, will have killed fewer people. Unless the trolley speeds up to account for that and always kills n people per second, the top track will result in less deaths over any period of time.
The straight ahead track actually kills an infinite number of people every interval of time.
The tram travels at light speed and so time no longer flows for you. You exist in a singular moment of splattergore.
But even light speed is finite for the people on the track. It’s only the tram that stops experiencing time.
Also, you’re not on the tram. You’re standing at the switch.
All trolleys to date have been finite. A trolley which can kill an infinite number of people would truly be a marvel of engineering.
Every finite trolley passes infinitely many points when moves, if you accept space as infinitly divisible (structured as the real numbers).
The train tracks are linear time on Earth. It’s basically the choice between letting people be killed or dying of old age.
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.
In any non-empty, finite interval on the real number line, there are uncountably infinitely many numbers = people in this thought experiment. If you think of physical space as continuous, we cross infinitely many points in any finite movement.
I’d like to see one of the numerous paradoxes you refer to.
Pulling the lever will kill people slower, therefore less deaths in the lifetime of the universe.
Fewer deaths
Gram
Or will leaving it cause the higher density of bodies to slow the trolley resulting in slower killing in the lifetime of the universe… which either way is infinite deaths?
Pull the lever, thus killing -1/12th people.
Killing -1/12th? I didn’t know it can revive people.
Move to the end of the track and undo the constraints of people on the track. You will have infinite time until the trolly reaches the end, and can thusly save infinite lives by doing so.
Sadly, it takes an infinite amount of time to reach the end of the track. Thankfully, you have infinity time, though it’s still inconvenient. An infinite number of people people will die (instead of an infinite number of people), but you’ll save an infinite number of people in the end. After an infinite amount of time that will be infinitely better!
but if the trolley moves at a faster pace than you so you will never catch up?
Just ride another trolley on the other track.
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?
Depends
I expect it would be more able to cleanly cut through the bodies or throw them out of the way with more momentum. If it’s going slow it’s more likely to ride up on top of a body. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that derailers tend not to work on fast moving trains.
“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?
Any non-empty interval on the real number line holds uncountably infinitely many points.
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!
Fuck you Ayn Rand! I’m the railroad magnate now!
I come to an agreement with the person who has tied these people to the tracks to untie every 2nd person. I save an infinite number of people!
I tried to do a similar deal and ended up with negative one twelfth of a person dead.
The solution that gains us a person at the limit
Do nothing, since an infinite number of people implies an inconceivable population overgrowth, so the best possible good for humanity is to cull the population.
Heck, you could probably go out and genocide the rest of the population that isn’t tied to the track and still not suffer any real loss. Then, you face the last true enemy: the bloodsoaked beast responsible for the deaths of untold billions- yourself.
Once you’ve slain that last creature, all of humanity that still remains will be those tied to the railroad track. The only living people will spend their entire lives knowing nothing but the track and the trolley, and the imposing fear that one day, they, too, shall be crushed under its wheels like those before them.
The only life remaining for the human race is now one of terror and eventual slaughter. There are no good outcomes to this conundrum. There are only the uncaring wheels of the trolley.
shouldn’t there be at least one guy on the trolley?
This feels like a Warhammer thing.
I kill the trolley driver. The Dead Man button makes that the trolley stops.
The top track can be assumed to be of infinite length, but for the bottom track this is not enough - to fit ℵ people on it, they’ll have to be infinitely compressed. And since they are compressed - they are already dead. I’m not pulling the lever - preventing the (farther) desecration of corpses does not merit killing people who are still alive.
As a mathematician, this strikes me as an entirely reasonable interpretation, except for the fact that the compressed bodies would form a black hole, killing everyone regardless.
So you’re correct to say that you wouldn’t pull the lever, but your reasoning still missed an important detail.
I don’t think a black hole would have time to form before the entire universal collapse, though
that’s infinite mass inside infinite volume right there, we aren’t talking about only infinite density anymore
we need to get a theoretical physicist on this… track
