Comment by handojin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by handojin | Hacker News Reader

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The trolley problem is an interesting frame.

For the sake of an unfamiliar reader, in the problem, we have a man standing by the buffers and an out of control trolley car. We're asked to choose between pulling a lever, which will divert the car to the buffers, thus killing the man but saving the people on board the car, or not pulling the lever, which results in the deaths of the trolley passengers but allows the man to live.

Choice one:

The out of control car is 'not your fault' but deliberately choosing to kill the man would be. You couldn't live with yourself knowing you'd been the cause of his death. You opt not to pull the lever.

Choice two:

That's crazy. None of this is your fault but it's your 'responsibility' to choose now. It's a simple utilitarian calculus - more lives = better. You pull the lever.

My problem with all this is that either response (and people split on the response) is nothing more than a reflection of the unconscious biases of the respondent. This is revealed when we discover that by changing the framing slightly - e.g. asking the question in another language (a different part of the brain is engaged = more utilitarians) or making the killing of the innocent man a direct act (you push him off an overpass = more 'not my faults') - changes the balance of responses in statistically significant ways.

The right answer, of course, is to toss a coin and do what it tells you.

I would run over the single man without hesitation or guilt. I believe that his fate led him to his unfortunate predicament.

In other threads, ppl talk about if there is a stream of consciousness that we come from. I believe it is a stream of fate. A person inherits luck from past actions, whether they be from this life, from their ancestry (grandparents choosing a country), and from previous lives (knowing - really knowing - something is the wrong thing - that moral inner voice or unreasonable fear of it).

Luck can be increased through right action or ritual. It can be passed on to your children and grandchildren.

This belief allows me to be fearless as I go about my daily activities as I know I am always improving my future lot.

I believe a lot of odd results that come out of hypotheticals lie with the fact that they're hypotheticals.

The trolley problem makes an inherent assumption that value can be summed by adding up people (i.e., more people > less people), and therefore there's only one truly correct answer, but that's not how decisions are actually made in the real world and there are very good reasons for that.

For instance: why is there a group of people and then the separate individual? Does the group have something in common? Is there something special about the individual? Someone made a judgment call when they created the situation. The end result is now unknown, and my answer would be that the decision therefore doesn't matter.

Choosing to do something would require performing another judgment call, which is actually very problematic. This is demonstrated fairly well by one of the reframings of the problem: the one where a surgeon kills a healthy person to save 5 dying patients. A world in which such things happen would be considered quite terrible by many, yes this seems to be a valid implementation of the trolley problem. The surgeon could then take his 5 patients and the one healthy person and recreate a trolley scenario and then let someone else deal with it. The correct answer, according to a person who doesn't want healthy travelers sacrificed for people who need organs, would be to not touch the lever. Yet, they do not have access to this information, so they do not know what the end result is. So the decision doesn't matter.

The responsibility is indeed with whoever has created the situation. Another party getting involved may make it better or worse by sheer luck but "more people > less people" is, in my opinion, a horrible philosophy and this implicit assumption should be thrown out of the problem. Once you do that, though, the problem disintegrates.

I would generally be wary of critique of intuition based on failure in hypotheticals. Intuition wasn't designed around hypotheticals and doesn't believe in them.

Everything both you and parent poster said boils down to "run away from the question because I don't like either of the answers." Which is a very human response, but you then throw the baby out with the bath water.

To be really useful, you need to consider these thought experiments in the least convenient world - assume that there is explicitly no way to avoid the central point (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_wor... for further reading). So in this case, it doesn't matter 'whose fault' the predicament is. You don't know anything about the individuals involved except the number killed by each of two choices. "Optimise net lives saved" is indeed a horrible strategy, but under the least convenient possible circumstances can you come up with a better one?

Your comment on intuition failing on hypothetical scenarios is on the mark, and that's the point of this kind of scenario - to see in what way intuition fails, and how it will fail in different directions based on presentation (eg. we'll passively let 5 people die rather than actively killing one, but we'll save 5 people even if it involves indirectly killing one.)

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