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.
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 would question the ability to line people up on a railroad track such that they have a 1:1 correspondence with the real numbers.
Yeah, for any length of track, you would need to stack infinite people...
We need to shut down these trolley experiments until we figure out what the hell is going on
Unless the trolley is traveling with infinite velocity or the people have infinitely small mass, it would never make it past its first countable infinity of people. Therefore there is no difference.
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.
People die faster if you do nothing, so doing nothing seems like the obvious choice
I kill the trolley driver. The Dead Man button makes that the trolley stops.
I'll do nothing. Either way those people will eventually die - because of the train or because of starvation and dehydration. I would prefer the train.
If you want to be a true masochist, you could re-run the experiment on Reddit - hurk 🤮.
The beauty of Lemmy is that here we can at least talk about such neat things:-).
Probably pull the leaver cuz then I can jump in front of the train.
Did nobody have math class? The pictures are always misleading!
It never actually specifies the density the people are packed onto the track, the image implies an answer.
I'd argue that the densities should be considered to be equal, regardless of whatever that density value may be. We do not need to solve for the exact value to discuss the problem at hand!
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.
Pull the lever. Save as many lives as you can and hope that someone that now wasn't killed as fast can help come up with a solution for the runaway trolley.
