Might work well for masochists, for whom the pain will give the same immediacy without the conditioning you’re concerned about. Maybe I should try it when I next encounter a real-life trolley problem.
Hm… in the trolley problem at least one person gets saved, but if you don’t lay off a person and the company goes bankrupt, everyone is out of a job, so that makes the choice much easier. And even if you could formulate the problem so it really was a choice between 1 person getting fired or 5 other people getting fired, that would be easy; it’s obviously better to fire just one (at least, as long as you don’t know anything else about the people—for some people getting fired would be a bigger problem than for others).
I wished for an example without killing, but maybe it is essential to the problem, after all. I guess the choice would at least have to make you do something you’d normally consider immoral, like stealing or lying, else you’d just say ‘oh, harm only one vs. harming several, easy choice’.
By “trolley problem,” do you mean a case where I can kill one person to prevent the deaths of N people? A case where I can harm one person to prevent equivalent harm to N people? Or something more specialized?
(nods) So, would you categorize, for example, a situation where curtailing the speech of one person on a forum increases the likelihood that a community on that forum will speak freely, as a trolley problem?
Yes, I think so. I can see myself as a forum administrator, wondering if I should ban this guy that really hasn’t done anything against the rules, but he’s slowly driving away other users all the same. That would be a difficult decision.
I like this form of the problem much better, and it makes me more willing to actually think about it.
The trolley problem is a) distressing, because it’s about life and death, and b) very contrived, and some years ago I decided, IIRC because of something I read on LW, that I wouldn’t bother thinking about that sort of thing anymore. “Who would you save, if you had to choose between your mother and your father?” Get lost! I don’t want to think about that, and I don’t need to, because I’m never going to be in that situation anyway.
But this is a real situation, that real people have been in. It must have been very difficult. What did you do?
To a first approximation, I do in the real-life forum problem precisely what I expect I would do in the canonical trolley problem… I dither, fail to take any effective action at all, allow the larger group to suffer, and feel bad about it later.
Might work well for masochists, for whom the pain will give the same immediacy without the conditioning you’re concerned about. Maybe I should try it when I next encounter a real-life trolley problem.
Have you ever encountered a real-life trolley problem? I would like to see an example of one. I’ve never encountered any myself (that I can remember).
Does laying off people to save the company count? Or does killing have to be involved?
Hm… in the trolley problem at least one person gets saved, but if you don’t lay off a person and the company goes bankrupt, everyone is out of a job, so that makes the choice much easier. And even if you could formulate the problem so it really was a choice between 1 person getting fired or 5 other people getting fired, that would be easy; it’s obviously better to fire just one (at least, as long as you don’t know anything else about the people—for some people getting fired would be a bigger problem than for others).
I wished for an example without killing, but maybe it is essential to the problem, after all. I guess the choice would at least have to make you do something you’d normally consider immoral, like stealing or lying, else you’d just say ‘oh, harm only one vs. harming several, easy choice’.
By “trolley problem,” do you mean a case where I can kill one person to prevent the deaths of N people? A case where I can harm one person to prevent equivalent harm to N people? Or something more specialized?
I meant a case where you can harm one person to prevent equivalent harm to N people.
(nods) So, would you categorize, for example, a situation where curtailing the speech of one person on a forum increases the likelihood that a community on that forum will speak freely, as a trolley problem?
Yes, I think so. I can see myself as a forum administrator, wondering if I should ban this guy that really hasn’t done anything against the rules, but he’s slowly driving away other users all the same. That would be a difficult decision.
Then, yes, I’ve encountered real-life trolley problems.
I like this form of the problem much better, and it makes me more willing to actually think about it.
The trolley problem is a) distressing, because it’s about life and death, and b) very contrived, and some years ago I decided, IIRC because of something I read on LW, that I wouldn’t bother thinking about that sort of thing anymore. “Who would you save, if you had to choose between your mother and your father?” Get lost! I don’t want to think about that, and I don’t need to, because I’m never going to be in that situation anyway.
But this is a real situation, that real people have been in. It must have been very difficult. What did you do?
To a first approximation, I do in the real-life forum problem precisely what I expect I would do in the canonical trolley problem… I dither, fail to take any effective action at all, allow the larger group to suffer, and feel bad about it later.