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Pulling the Lever in a Subway Problem
18 points18 comments0.8 average comments/hourSubmitted by NaOH
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> The worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently. On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour, perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people 1hr / 16 / 365 = 4.3y).* I am not convinced by these kinds of calculations, and I think they generally do rationalists & their like a big disfavor. A year of someone's life is approximately 9,000 hours. If you spend an hour commuting to work and back for 30+ years, that's approximately the same amount of time. But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.) I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.
Comment on Hacker News · 4 direct repliesExcellent trolley problem. Living with your decisions is unavoidable. I would be able to live with "I stopped a train because I wasn't sure if someone was about to be maimed."
Comment on Hacker News> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation. This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesAnyone who rode the L train this morning on their commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan knows whats up.
Comment on Hacker NewsI think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesThe fact that this is a "problem" is telling. I think a lot of people have been quietly traumatized by propaganda around authority and consequences. There's an unlimited amount of this content on social media platforms. If you can't quickly run the min/max on consequences for pulling a subway emergency brake, you probably shouldn't be allowed to ride the subway without some kind of exception on file.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies