@ErictheCerise Shouldn't we figure out who tied them there so that we can tie these people instead of the innocent ones? I mean, ... just a thought, you know...

@ErictheCerise @lis

@ErictheCerise

Thinking now about the guy who made a trolley car problem out of toy trains for his 2 or 3 year old, and how his child ran over all of the people tied to the tracks in a batch then went around and also ran over the single person tied to the other track, because that was evidently the point of the whole activity

@ErictheCerise
Also why is the trolley going so fast it can't be stopped in time?

@ErictheCerise @cstross “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.

We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

(Irving Zola, often misattributed to Desmond Tutu)

@ErictheCerise same deal with the Prisoner's Dilemma, really

@ErictheCerise The construction of the problem determines that all sanctioned outcomes are bad. By the time you arrive at the switch lever, you have already lost. To truly beat the trolley problem, one must build a hypothetically robust pedestrian and cyclist architecture, wherein everything in Maslow's hierarchy is available by imagining it within walking distance, instead of tram distance. Then the one gluing people to the bike paths can be chased down on foot and dealt with appropriately.

@ErictheCerise

Excellent question, it reminded me of this:
https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

@ErictheCerise Excellent point. There are other reasons to loathe the trolley problem: it is falsely limiting--it keeps on curbing your attempts to escape bad choices, & being forced to consider the available choices is a kind of torture. Proponents of these thought experiments say they help prepare for crisis triage--FALSE. In true crises, you're not limited by spurious constraints. Truly the only way to win w/trolley problems is not to play.

@ErictheCerise

The answer is usually right in front of you.

https://enantiomer.org/blog/trolley-solution/

@ErictheCerise In education, for a long time, people have been using a similar "babies in the river" analogy: educators keep seeing babies in the river, so they assemble teams & strategies to pull babies out of the river, resuscitate them, & nurse them back to health. And they get pretty good at this, so people began evaluating "best strategies" & punishing the teams that aren't as good. But nobody seems willing to walk upstream & stop whoever's throwing them in the river in the first place.

@ErictheCerise I consider the climate crisis as a trolley car problem. It is just so very, very convenient to stay on the track we are on.

@ErictheCerise this is insightful

@ErictheCerise and also, who cut costs on maintenance and caused all these trolleys to have defective brakes?

@ErictheCerise Yes and the Heinz dilemma would be solved by national health.

@ErictheCerise I often think of Hal Draper's point that most often, when choosing the lesser of two evils, the real tragedy is in accepting the limitations of the choice.

@ErictheCerise 🤯

@ErictheCerise Well done.🙂

@ErictheCerise And don't waste time with thoughts in a sophisticated prisoners dilemma - untie them, cut them loose.

@ErictheCerise Brilliant post 🏆

@ErictheCerise they listened to the owner of the railroad.

@ErictheCerise
Even in the mildest version of the trolley problem, where everything is a genuine accident, the underlying problem is lack of attention to safety. Real world trolley companies avoid this kind of accident through proper maintenance, bells on the trolley to warn people it's coming, and control over their right of way to keep people off the tracks.

@ErictheCerise This is so smart and so clarifying, I love everything about it and I thank you for posting.

@ErictheCerise
This is also true of "The Cold Equations" and its spiritual descendants. It's not physics, it's politics.

@ErictheCerise

@ErictheCerise I have discovered that people (i.e. my friends) get quite agitated if you approach the trolley problem in any way that isn't being forced to choose. Coming up with a solution where everyone lives is missing the point, apparently.

@ErictheCerise PPPRRREEAAAAAAAACCCHHH 💯💯💯🤌🤌

@ErictheCerise while I appreciate the sentiment of the analysis (and agree that in practice that's a much more important aspect to address), that's not really the point of the problem: what it posits is a question on whether or not it's ethical to act to sacrifice someone (other than yourself) for the good of the many. The problem is, it does it very poorly because it gives a lot of leeway to interpretations that go beyond that. There may be nobody tying people to cars, it may be intrinsic.

@ErictheCerise or to phrase it succinctly.

Whya are the people that tied them to the tracks and power the trolley car, making YOU choose?

@ErictheCerise The guillotine problem – who should we execute to eradicate the trolley problem?

@ErictheCerise thank you for this

@ErictheCerise I think I agree with you. But this does not solve the problem in cases where you can make the difference in an acute situation. Like the trolly car problem. Asking yourself "who are those people..." is not relevant for the problem at hand. Only to avoid the problem in the future.

@ErictheCerise Strong disagree. Gosh, it's hard enough to devise a thought experiment that challenges people's ethical intuitions without this sort of tortured search for an escape hatch.

No one tied them to the tracks. If you don't like this metaphor, choose another one. The point is: how do you deal with direct conflicts between individual rights. Or how do you deal with conflicts between utilitarian intuitions (save the most people) and intuitions about individual rights.

@ErictheCerise

@ErictheCerise Fine- say no one tied them to the tracks. For the five people, their car broke down on the track and they can't get out quick enough. And for the one person, they were biking across the tracks and tipped over onto the track and are stuck.

Or choose whatever other formulation you like: the transplant case; the stuck potholer, and so on and so forth. Any formulation that captures the concept (direct conflict between rights; conflict of utilitarianism against individual rights).

@ErictheCerise @joegaffey Good point! My answer to the trolley problem is to set the control to half way so that the trolley derails while I’m untieing everyone.

@ErictheCerise
This is literally how we've been approaching climate change. And COVID restrictions.

@ErictheCerise Another good question is: "why am I the one at the lever?"

@ErictheCerise

@ErictheCerise yes, we agree

during our time doing privacy work at Google, it often felt a lot like answering trolley problems for a living. we tweeted a bit back then about how it was quite draining and most people, if put in that position, would just quit.

@ErictheCerise I’ve always held that the proper solution to the trolly problem is to blow the trolly up. It can’t hurt anyone if it doesn’t exist.

@ErictheCerise I always saw the problem, the artificial forcing of a choice.

I generally thought that the solution is to not do the things that bring this choice (driving slower etc.)

Your interpretation really added something, and i admire your thought. It is another thing like the "carbon footprint" that BP did. A distraction. Thank you.

@ErictheCerise so happy with this toot

@ErictheCerise

Going back some years, I recall this article from El Reg:
https://www.theregister.com/2016/10/12/mercedes_autonomous_car_will_run_over_pedestrians/

My personal take is that the car should always sacrifice itself to save the squishy beings outside the car. After all, with current safety features (crumple zones, airbags etc.) the occupants of the car are likely to survive anyway.

@ErictheCerise @StefanThinks Even for the classic form of the trolley problem, which is just a numbers game, your point (and that of all the “Find whoever keeps tying people to the tracks” jokes) is well taken.

The “surprising” finding that many people won’t, say, throw the switch to save four people on the main track but sacrifice one on the side isn’t surprising at all—the person who tied everybody to the tracks killed the four, but if I threw the switch I’ve chosen to kill the one myself.

@ErictheCerise Yes! This reminds me of the Heinz dilemma (cf. Kohlberg and later reinterpreted by Gilligan in an ethics of care perspective) and the answer 11yo Amy gives: basically the ethical issue is not whether to steal life-saving medicine or not but why it isn't available to those who need it

@ErictheCerise gotta find whoever's tying people to railroad tracks and put them on ice

@ErictheCerise Excellent point. Though I think the analogy isn't perfect, someone will always be "on the tracks" and take the hit when society encounters a problem.

I suspect if we just kept a few billionaires and senators tied to the tracks, there would be a lot fewer run-away trolleys in the first place. Government should fear its citizens, etc etc.

@ErictheCerise
If it's billionaires tied to the diversion track, and nobody tied to the default track, I'm pulling the god damn lever and laughing as I do so.

@ErictheCerise This is a great point. All I want to add is that you can also just flip the switch while the trolley is partway over, "splitting the switch" and bringing the trolley safely into a controlled derailment. Rail worker meme pages figured this out years ago.

There's always a creative solution.

@ErictheCerise and where was the security people doing when they got tied? how did they see nothing?

@ErictheCerise Those people are tied to the tracks to enable the billionaires, the corporations, the bankers to be what they are and do what they do. The heights they soar to are less their measure than the depths they stoop to.

(Also: if water is running into the bathtub at 3 litres/min and out the drain at 2.6 litres/min…then how long will it take someone to close the goddamn drain?)

@ErictheCerise

Everybody just swallows the premise without question. Drop them in a SAW movie and they'll just start tearing themselves apart without even checking if the door is locked.

I don't know what it is with people. Tell them to make a binary choice and they'll fight tooth and nail over which thing is "better" or "worse" without bothering to wonder WHY they're doing any of it in the first place. Like vampires that have to stop and count seeds you throw in front of them.

@ErictheCerise this!!!

@ErictheCerise Ha! You are so right. I am actually teaching an Ethical Leadership class now (well, not now now, we are on a break).
I ll definitely use this with my students.

@ErictheCerise the real trolley problem was the friends we squashed along the way.