A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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!
Would suck being the last person on either track. It'd be a long and boring wait while tied up
Jump in front of the trolley, someone else's problem
This comment section is politics in action! :-P
i love stirring the pot.
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:-).
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.
I know many people despise generative AI, but what do you think of this result from Copilot? I am bad at maths so I wonder if you experts can tell.
In your scenario, you have two sets: the integers on the top track and the real numbers on the bottom track. The cardinality of the integers is equal to the cardinality of the real numbers, which is called the continuum hypothesis. Therefore, it seems intuitively more ethical to pull the lever and divert the trolley to the bottom track, where you kill fewer people in any finite time.
it seems intuitively more ethical to pull the lever and divert the trolley to the bottom track,
not an expert but the integer one is at the top i think
It's completely wrong within ZF set theory the cardinality of the integers is stricly smaller than the cardinality of the real numbers. The continuum hypothesis states that there is no set with a cardinality strictly larger than the natural numbers (or integers) and strictly smaller than the real numbers.
It accidentally kind of comes to the right conclusion, but even the conclusion isn't really correct, you don't need to be concerned with finite time since integers are a smaller cardinality.
Let's say people can be placed on a point on the track indexed by the real numbers, given any two seperate, finite, points, there would be more people packed between those two points than the entire integer track.
I get that the answer is supposed to be "it doesn't matter" but if you take time into account, it actually fucking does, and also makes it hugely obvious what the actual answer is.
from the picture this is true but from the statement alone both options are identical
If we have infinite people, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to lose a couple.
i'd ask for a second train.
If the tracks are scaled to the same unit (presumably one where one human width equals an infinitely small number), everyone in the top track would die of exposure before the trolley even reaches its first victim due to there being infinite distance between integer milestones, whereas everyone in the bottom track would be killed instantly due to any distance traveled having an infinite number of infinitesimals*. So I choose the bottom track to be merciful.
If the tracks don't share the same scale then we don't have enough information to make a judgment.
* Even though we already established the one human width rule. Could someone check my logic here? Infinities break my brain.
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.
99% hitler vs. 100% hitler
US_electoral_politics.jpg
I am sure even countably infinite people would violate some law of thermodynamics.
Infinity people always die. Even if you don't make a decision.
Some infinities are bigger than others but those are both the same sized infinity, ℵ₀. Same if you multi-track drift.
Edit: I didn't read it closely enough, it says "one person for every real number". Which is indeed a larger infinity. However I don't think you can diagram that, the diagram is showing a countable infinity of people on the lower track.
Killing one person for each real number, the train will be killing an uncountably infinite quantity of people in any given finite time slice.