Hacker News Reader

Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> The “quadrillion days of happiness” offered to a rational person gives away that such allegories are anthropomorphized just for the sake of presentation.

So what? It's still presented as if it's a interesting problem that needs to be "remedied", when in fact it's just a basic maths mistake.

If I said "ooo look at this paradox: 1 + 1 = 2, but if I add another one then we get 1 + 1 + 1 = 2, which is clearly false! I call this IshKebab's mugging.", you would rightly say "that is dumb; go away" rather than write a Wikipedia article about the "paradox" and "remedies".

> Similarly the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation, or else the correct answer would always be “do nothing”.

It absolutely wouldn't. I don't know how anyone with any morals could claim that.

View on HN

Interestingly, the trolley problem is decided every day, and humanity does not change tracks.

There are people who die waiting for organ donors, and a single donor could match multiple people. We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

Yea, it doesn’t seem quite right to say that the trolley problem isn’t about really people. I mean the physical mechanical system isn’t there but it is a direct abstraction of decisions we make every day.

> the trolley problem isn’t about really people

My actual words quoted below give one extra detail that makes all the difference, one that I see people silently dropped in a rush to reply. The words were aimed at someone taking these problems in a too literal sense, as extra evidence that they are not to be taken as such but as food for though that has real life applicability.

> the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation

> We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

I don't think that matches the trolley problem particularly well for all sorts of reasons. But anyway your point is irrelevant - his claim was that the trolley problem isn't about real humans, not that people would pull the lever.

Edit: never mind, I reread your comment and I think you were also agreeing with that.

> his claim was that the trolley problem isn't about real humans

Is it though? Let's look at the comment [0] written 8h before your reply:

> the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation

As in "don't take things absolutely literally like you were doing, because you'll absolutely be wrong". You found a way to compound the mistake by dropping the critical information then taking absolutely literally what was left.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907977

I would pull the lever in the trolley problem and don't support murdering people for organs.

The reason is that murdering people for organs has massive second-order effects: public fear, the desire to avoid medical care if harvesting is done in those contexts, disproportionate targeting of the organ harvesting onto the least fortunate, etc.

The fact that forcibly harvesting someone’s organs against their will did not make your list is rather worrying. Most people would have moral hangups around that aspect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com