One musta assume 100 reincarnating trolley people happy
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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The absurd is a result of the confrontation between human need and the unending screams of the victims being run over infinitely.
It really depends on the specifics of the top track. Are people added to the top track just in time to be run over by the trolley, or is the track pre-populated with an endless arrangement of people waiting to be run over.
If it's the later case, how do people further down the track survive for an unbounded amount of time while waiting to be run over? Do they wait, bound and screaming for an eternity? How do they survive long enough to be alive before being run over?
I need to know if the top track reduces to running over an infinite arrangement of corpses. Or, if trolley time for the top track has some different meaning, such that the trolley brings an end to the finite life lived by each next person on the track.
They're just on salvia so it feels infinite but it's probably 2 minutes max
For any randomly chosen person on an infinitely long track, the trolley will take an infinite amount of time to reach them. 0% of the people on the track are harmed at all.
100 people hands down. Infinite people means infinite lives removed, infinite experiences etc. The 100 people will never truly die either, so if minimizing death is the goal, that's best. It also is the choice that will happen without your input and those are usually better morally than actively changing and sentencing other people to death by yourself.
Minimizing death by replacing it with eternal torment is some evil genie shit.
I vote for fair distribution of suffering, instead of to just 100 people.
Why tho? Your choice is to condemn a few, versus kill more people than have died throughout all of history of humankind. 100 is a drop in a bucket compared to eternal genocide.
It's a communist thing. Fair distribution of wealth and suffering.
It's a capitalist assumption to think people with less karma goes first.
Would you change your answer based on where you are on the tracks?
Plus, it's assumed that the trolley will never stop. It's easier to utilize its free energy if it's running in a circle.
I smell hilbert's hotel:
Let the trolley run on the top track, but before it can hit anyone, move everybody one to the right. Repeat the process infinitely. Nobody gets run over.
Infinite suffering for a small group of people in exchange for saving everyone else in existence is basically the story of the Heralds in Stormlight Archive
Prior to that, 'The ones who walk away from Omelas'
Also the reveal in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
So, uh. Spoilers.
Hmm, why are people so bad at teaching calc 2?
This isn't even an isolated thing, I was a physics math double major and I've got into discussions with friends, and the overwhelming consensus was that calc 2 was the worst. Possibly because it's where sequences and series show up, whereas calc 3 is just calc 1 but in more dimensions.
You can add me to the list of people that had a whole ass problem with calc 2. In addition to what you mentioned, my professor was the kind of guy who looked down on you if you didn't know as much math as him and he had his doctorate in math. He laughed at people asking questions. His office hours was just him asking if you were too stupid to do math.
I don't know where he is now but I sure hope he's stepping on a LEGO brick every morning when he gets out of bed.
And also, why are so many people traumatized by calc 2 and not by ordinary differential equations and complex analysis?
A lot of people have to take calc 2, but not ODE or Analysis. I had to take ODE, but nor Analysis for example.
I pull the switch when the trolley is straddling the switching point, thus safely derailing the vehicle so it doesn't kill anyone.
This is some real funbreaker bullshit, I tell you what.
See, the thing about the 1+1+1 is that they can't all die at ONCE. Even moving at a reasonable clip, let's say that trolley kills say, one person a second. Two people per second already die anyway, so yes, we're increasing the mortality rate, but humanity can survive that, and statistically a lot of people wouldn't end up dying by trolley. It would SUCK that there's a chance you might wind up on the trolley and dead at any time, but dying is already a natural part of life and it happens to everyone at some point anyway, so there's nothing inherently STRANGE about adding a trolley death every second.
The 100 reincarnating people will be suffering FOREVER, repeatedly, with no reprieve or redemption, and the real kicker is all the other people in the other lane are dying ANYWAY, just as people always have, so it's not like you've really SAVED them - you've just not allowed the mortality rate to increase at the cost of eternal suffering for a few people. Doesn't seem like a good trade.
It's a more interesting question if we change it slightly and all of the infinite people are Wolverine, bub.
Spoilers for Deadpool and Wolverine.
!Just throw down an infinite number of Deadpools, one between each Wolverine, have them all join hands and blast Madonna. Trolley is defeated.!<
I think ethically, you have to let 1 + 1 + 1... die.
To let the same hundred people be tortured for eternity is basically hell.
No. Reincarnation means they never really experience the consequence of death, so the latter is equivalent to no punishment at all. The more important consideration for both is how they exist between getting run over.
I dunno man, seems like you're presupposing death is worse than eternal torment, which is debatable.
I believe OP is conflating reincarnation with resurrection. I believe the concept of reincarnation is incompatible with the hypothetical.
This assumes the amount of excruciating pain and horror of being run over by a trolley before death is zero, and while I haven't been run over by a trolley personally, I'd have to imagine it's not fun.
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Multi track drifting might be the solution in this case
Easy, move the second and third together, 4th, 5th and 6th together, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, and so on. Killing 1 + 2 + 3... until infinite, having Killing a total of -1/12 person.
That trolley problem is intense: would you direct the trolley onto a track as driving_crooner described or let the trolley run on an empty track?
Do I get to choose the 100 people?
Flip the lever right as the cart is going by to derail it
The 1+1+1... Track, because it's objectively the better option. The trolley will not last forever, so the more moral option when facing two "infinite death" scenarios is the minimize the kills per second, and the top track is less densely packed.
In this exact scenario, I feel like the bottom track would slow the trolley down quicker, no? There is no room to stabilize, just pure flesh on wheel, 24/7. Not to mention the constant sharp turns, I think it would topple over long before the top one reaches its final kill count.
Yeah, but the bottom ones reincarnate.
So of you go with the bottom one, everyone will survive
That's... Much more sensible actually
I feel like the spirit of the situation requires a trolley that can run infinitely and which successfully kills any person it touches and isn't impeded by people
Everyone overlooking the rigorous maintenance required on the trolley. There will need to be several seamless swap outs each day with cleaning and engineering crews to keep the trolley, tracks, and grounds around running in a fulfilling order. And probably some ovens.
We are overlooking it, because it isn't part of the hypothetical.
Otherwise we would also be discussing the logistics of tying infinite people to the train tracks, or the regeneration speed of human bodies.
It is either finite suffering for infinite people, or infinite suffering for finite people. Which implies the train to keep working for infinity.
"We"? Who's "we"?
All the other "experts" that failed to realise either option cannot occur indefinitely without a good limb clean out every now and then?
You can imply what you like, but the ~~meme~~ diagram is very clear and should be taken ~~light-heartedly~~ very seriously. Especially since it's the Trolley Problem scenario.
The illusion of choice, either way there will be infinite suffering
Isn't the main argument of Christianity that the second option was better than the first?
Is the sum 1 + 1 + 1... different than 1 + 2 + 3...?