Good thing that most people tend to judge you for killing a given finite number of people, rather than based on the percentage of the population. That is to say, If you kill one random person in China, you're generally considered just as much a murderer as if you kill one random person in Luxembourg
I'm not sure if that's necessarily true. For one thing, thanks to ✨racism✨, who you kill will influence how you're viewed. And if you kill enough people, I think it often causes people to view the event less personally ("one person is a tragedy, a million is a statistic"). Of course, that also depends on how you kill them. Killing one innocent looking civilian with a trolley will go over a lot worse than sending a million soldiers to die in a war (no matter how pointless or wrong the war was).
That's the joke. You can take any person and zoom in and out at will to make it better or worse
Also the trolley is how you get to work, so if you stop it you can't get to work and pay your rent so
I pause to wonder the manufacture of the trolley, seeing as it should have derailed by now, causing an end to the death. Yet, it continues its eternal murderous journey.
The whole 0% thing works best if you aren't aware of how far the train has already gone.
So you can't weigh any past quantity dead on any theoretical 0% future
If I let the trolley go indefinitely, will it eventually kill the infinite amount of people?
As long as the lever is pulled before I die, then it will be about 0%. But if I die before I pull the lever, and no one else pulls the lever, then it will go on for an infinite amount of time and kill all of them
So, to make sure that you can meet all of them in the afterlife, you must not pull the lever. If you do then they'll live forever.
There is no afterlife. You reincarnate as the last person tied to the tracks. That’s how they make it infinite.
The obvious response is to stop the trolley. Regardless of the percentage, people will continue to die if you don't. The perspective doesn't matter, the fact is there are people ahead who are alive.
This right here is what it boils down to when someone responds to a wrongful killing by police with a questionable statistic about how it's only a tiny fraction of interactions that end that way.
what if the number of people on the tracks is “infinite in both directions”? eg the trolley “starts at” -∞?
That's still the same size of infinity. Infinities are strange. But you can rearrange -∞ to ∞ to be the same size as 0 to ∞. You can do this by moving the negative numbers alongside their positive counterpart, like so:
0, 1, -1, 2, -2, 3, -3, etc.
This infinity is still a countable infinity, same as
0, 1, 2, 3, etc.
So it makes no difference whether you start at 0 or -∞
very true that infinities are strange. while starting at -∞ would not affect the cardinality, it would change the scenario.
we can think about starting at -∞ as counting the trolleys position using the integers, and we can think about starting at 0 as using the natural number to count the trolleys position. for example, the integer n would correspond to the trolley being on top of the n-th person. here we assume the trolley is moving to the right so the position increases as time passes. (if we change the setup so the trolley moves to the left, then it is possible that the trolley kills everyone in the second original setup but not the modified version.)
in the original setup, regardless of the trolleys position, the trolley would have killed finitely many people. (for any integer n, there are only finitely many nonnegative integers less than n). in the modified setup however, at any position, the trolley would have killed infinitely many people. (for any integer n, there are infinitely many integers less than n.) it’s a subtle difference but it does impact the scenario.
yeah, but if it starts at -inf and I start at 0 then I don't have to look at the horrible things I'm allowing to happen
yeah that may cause a few problems. there would also need to be an infinite amount of trolley track which may pose some infrastructure challenges
Did anyone else misread this as the rail being densely filled with humans (for every a,b in R, a < b, there are infinitely many humans in (a,b))?