As the famous Double Down Domino would say, "I'm doublin' down!"
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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How OSHA violations are born.
So how does that killing thing work, doing it by yourself or just thinking and the person dies?
I think with this scenario it's indirectly caused by you. Either you 'press a button,' directly resulting in the death of a specific individual, or another person is given the same scenario but the button directly causes double the number of deaths if they press it.
I say let it go for 33 doublings (2^33 people), and then decide.
Also interesting: What would you choose here if you were an evil psychopath? (Asking for an acquaintance.)
Switch the track from the bottom to the top as the train is half way over the switch, causing the train to drift across both rails hitting all three tied up people and the second switch operator.
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Depends on if you're happy with someone else killing lot more people, or if you want to kill someone yourself.
Assuming this goes to infinity, the reasonable thing to do is to kill one person to prevent someone else killing a lot of people. But that would make you directly responsible for killing that person.
Isn't redirecting making you directly responsible for minimum of 2 deaths?
No, that's someone else's choice to kill.
Double it. Then the other guy will double it, and so on. Infinite loop = no deaths.
And then there's some psycho on round 34 who kills all 8 billion people alive on earth.
You would need a crazy low probability of a lunatic or a mass murderer being down the line to justify not to kill one person
Edit: Sum(2^n (1-p)^(n-1) p) ~ Sum(2^n p) for p small. So you'd need a p= (2×2^32 -2) ~ 1/(8 billion) chance of catching a psycho for expected values to be equal. I.e. there is only a single person tops who would decide to kill all on earth.
You don't even need a lunatic or mass murderer. As you say, the logical choice is to kill one person. For the next person, the logical choice is to kill two people, and so on.
It does create the funny paradox where, up to a certain point, a rational utilitarian would choose to kill and a rational mass murderer trying to maximise deaths would choose to double it.
It's always "double it" Anyone after 34 flips the kill all humans, that's their fault not yours
Why do you care whose fault it is? You'd want to minimise human deaths, not win a blame game.
Doubling action forever minimizes human deaths.
Unless someone decide to hit kill. In that case, it's them doing it. I'm invalidating the argument that pre-empting imaginary future mass murders justifies killing one person today.
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