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One must imagine Maths grads happy
i
sqrt(-1)
The answer is obvious. You need 2 trolleys to take both tracks.
MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!!
Look at this genius here, optimizing the solution… 😂🤣
People = good
People = good
Why is that so hard to remember?
People = bad?
People = bad!
Dont make me get the spray bottle
well, with 2 trolleys it is the same amount of suffering as with 1
I’d do top case since the number of people killed would converge to -1/12 meaning no suffering
I thought that was for the sum of all positive integers (1+2+3+…). The sum if ones converges to ½.
That sum is wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuIIjLr6vUA
I go for option 1.
In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that’d be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either…
- a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
- death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
- or - if it’s an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit
So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that’s just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.
So the Zapp Brannigan approach?
Or is it like a Y2K death trolly and when the overflow happens the universe doesn’t catch the exception and things get weird. Like suddenly any number can be divided by 0.
Yeah okay but by that logic you’d also have to quantize time and the suffering would end either way in a finite amount of time.
They used database to store integer…
Ah, but eventually the trolley breaks down, and in the case of the reincarnating circle, you end up with zero deaths (but a whole lot of Therapy)
Where I’m from Calc 2 is integrals. That wasn’t so terrible. It was Calc 3 (vectors and series) that was the hard one.
At the universities I went to, Calc 2 was integration, sequences and series, then Calc 3 was multivariable. They really pack all the harder parts into 2.
I thought this was taught in high school. Curriculums differ drastically between countries, don’t they?
We were on quarters, so we had calc 1-4. Makes sense that Calc 2 was rough if you were on semesters.
I managed until university when I left calculus and entered “Linear Algebra” and man, I really don’t like matrices.
I made it through. My degree is actually in math. 15 years ago, I used to know what an abelian group is!
I found linear algebra super hard until I learned it a second and then third time, from different angles. I found it harder to understand when it was taught in a pure maths context, but coming at it from the applied side made me go “oh, so that’s why that’s like that”
My multivariate calc was a separate course from regular calc 1/2/3
Arguably these are different amounts of bad even before considering this: We generally consider existing preferable to non-existence to some extent when suffering isnt taken into account, consider that if you murder someone quickly and painlessly in their sleep without waking them, they dont really themselves suffer from it, but people will still find you to be a murderer, and would object to the idea that you might do it to them. In the top example, killing the people actually kills them, but in the lower example, it arguably doesnt, because the experiences of the people involved never actually cease, therefore, the lower path seems to me to be preferable because you supposedly get equivalent amounts of “suffering”, but different amounts of time that people spend in non-existence.
Morally speaking people could argue that torturing immortal people is worse.
However legally speaking to you don’t kill them and therefore the immortals are preferred.
No murder charge, just infinite attempted murder charges
That would mean you did it on purpose. But you didn’t power the trolley. You “accidentally” flipped the switch… And left. Since you can’t do more.
Though I do wonder whether a sufficiently good lawyer could argue that it’s not attempted murder if you knew they were immortal
Isn’t Stockholm Syndrome fake?
Actually upon looking it up, there is some suggestion that it is fake.
No?
I think the ones in the loop become Cenobites.
The abominable billionaire loop makes me happy
Well their heads aren’t on the tracks and they’re immortal, I bet we could rig some kind of device to make them total praplegics and then work on a direct neural interface so they can use computers while they lay there endlessly having their bodies painlessly trisected.
Or we could just like untie them
nah
Cant you just take people from the track with reincarnating people? They might have to die a couple of times, but thats nothing compared to infinity
Hell couldn’t be real because humans would eventually fetishize any pain input and dump buckets forever.
Some webcomic I saw back in the earlier days of the Internet
Allegedly it isn’t a place where you are tortured, but instead a state of permanent depression from being cut off from God. Just the former is easier for pop culture to portray.
This is the kind of trolley problem that makes Cenobites.
Also, Option 1 would essentially mean the end of the human race. Assuming the rate of killing is faster than the birth rate it would mean everyone dies soon
I mean, no? Its given in the question that option one is an infinite amount of people. Its not limited to just the existing human race.
