I’m always sad when I see this stuff. I know it’s all jokes and whatnot, but the entire meme has been born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the dilemma that the trolley problem is supposed to represent.
The question isn’t, and has never been whether you throw the switch or not. The question is that if you throw the switch, are you responsible for killing the one, or conversely, if you do nothing, are you responsible for killing the others?
Whether you throw the switch or not is immaterial to the point. Kill one or kill four (or whatever) it doesn’t matter. You didn’t create that scenario, so by your inaction several people died, are you responsible for their deaths, considering you never put them in that position? Or are you exempt of blame since you basically chose to be an onlooker?
I don’t really blame anyone for not getting it, I sure didn’t for a really long time until my friend rephrased the same dilemma in a different way (and omitted the trolley): you go to lunch and have a delicious subway sandwich, but you were not very hungry so you only are half. On your travels from Subway to wherever, you pass by a homeless person begging for food. If you decide to ignore them and keep your food for yourself for later, and that person dies of starvation later that same day because of it, are you responsible for their death?
In addition to philosophical questions, the Trolley Problem is also a good tool in psychology to study human ethical reasoning. It turns out that people’s intuitive responses vary quite a lot based on details that seem like they shouldn’t make a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, I believe that a lot more people say that they would divert the trolley if they imagine that they were observing the situation from a gantry high above the tracks, rather than in close proximity to the person who would be killed thereby.
For anyone interested, there is a nice video series on these comics by “CosmicSkeptic” on Youtube. He discusses some of the memes, but brings them nicely into a philosophical context at the same time.
When the Joker presents Batman with a trolley problem [Save Robin or Save Catwoman], Batman always finds a way to circumvent it and save both. Because he is Batman.
People will always try to get the best out of the situation, even though that isn’t what the exercise is about.
It’s the first question in a battery of questions designed to force you to be aware of inconsistencies in your ethical framework. The first answer is supposed to be obvious: Yes, you throw the switch, but most people’s reason for that creates a very messy precedent that the distinction between action and inaction doesn’t matter, only the outcome, which later questions can exploit.
The idea itself can be a rather interesting thing to explore as a thought experiment. Obviously the premise of the trolley problem is ridiculous, especially today since trains and especially trolleys are becoming much more rare for most people (with the exceptions for railroad tracks across roads, and passenger rail lines like subways and surface passenger services like we see in bullet trains). There are still railcars, like light rail transit in cities sometimes, but again, it’s fairly rare overall for the general public as a whole.
The idea of trolleys is a fairly outdated one and most of the safety systems in modern allegories are so robust that dangers are generally minimized.
Nevertheless, the moral quandary of whether you are responsible for injury or death as a result of your action (or inaction) is a fascinating mental exercise and has resulted in more than one discussion of adjacent morality concerns with the friend I mentioned. It’s fascinating to study overall, even in a casual context like we do.
I understand there’s a lot more to the picture when dealing with it in a more formal study, and that this question is only one piece of the puzzle when performing such studies.
The part that frustrates me more than anything is that people stop at whether or not to pull the lever, and run with it in memes and alternative solutions, rather than grappling with the moralities that are the root of the original question as part of the study. This is supposed to invoke a deep consideration about your actions and the responsibilities you may or may not be accepting when getting involved in a situation, and how your specific world view and moral “code” (so to speak) factors in. All of the memes and reposts of it, to me, always feel like it cheapens the meaning behind the initial problem as stated. However I understand that highly involved analytical thinking that forces you to consider all of those deep underlying concepts, requires significant mental work; system 2 work, of you will. Where you have to engage with your analytical “slow” thinking mind to really grasp, and our default reaction, as a species is that such thinking is usually something that will put us in danger, since our fast thinking system 1, can easily just blurt out an answer without considering it any further, saving significant mental effort.
I understand why people reduce this dilemma to the mechanical components of throwing a switch, but I always feel like they’re missing the entire point of the exercise.
I know Ellis Henican has a whole ass career that isn’t voice acting, but it kills me we only ever got him as Stormy Waters and nothing else. He’s got such a great voice!
And why is Arch more popular than Ubuntu? Surely SteamOS counts as something different, so it’s probably not that.
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu, but it’s a very popular beginner OS, and I’d assume a lot of Linux gamers are lazy and use the thing that gets them into a game the fastest.
I’ve had so many issues with Ubuntu in the last few years compared to other distros that honestly I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending it as a beginner distro anymore.
Which means, Ubuntu may have several separate entries, whereas Arch gets all combined altogether. If that’s the case, then likely not a very accurate Linux distro list without additional data cleaning to combine versions of distros.
Why are Arch and Manjaro in quotes, but Ubuntu LTS and Linux Mint aren’t?
They’re probably putting the rolling releases in quotation marks – I’m guessing they’re pulling the Description field from “lsb_release -a”, where “Arch Linux” says just that, while each Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/etc distro will show specific version numbers (and that would explain why Arch shows up as a higher share than Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS) – I’m sure there are several more Ubuntu entries in their list that would total more than Arch’s percentage. I’m not sure why they arbitrarily truncated the Linux list at 4 while showing 5 Windows/Mac releases, though.
EDIT: Found another screenshot where they list “SteamOS Holo” in quotes, too. So I guess they just include quotes for every distro that doesn’t show a version number in that field.
Is Arch the most popular Linux distro at 0.15% of 1.95%? What’s missing here? Steam OS?
A couple of things – yes, SteamOS is by far the most popular Linux distro and it was left off this part of the list, and also Arch is the most popular because it’s a rolling release distro, so we’re all running “Arch Linux” no matter how far behind we are on patching our system. Ubuntu would probably come out on top if you bundled every other version besides 22.04.3 LTS together into one line item.
Here’s a screenshot of the Linux breakdown with a few more entries (though most are still bucketed under Other). SteamOS alkone is almost half of Linux deployments.
In general white cishet westerners don’t know any social dynamic beyond the “in” group oppressing the “out” group (colonialism, settler-colonialism, slavery, capitalism, imperialism), so without targeted education, their imagination of different social structures can only be a projection of this assumed default state.
The original Pokemon universe is limited because it’s “family friendly all ages”, and there’s so much depth to be had that fans want but can’t get. This is why Palworld is exceeding; it’s embracing themes that the original Pokemon universe can’t.
Scarlet and Violet did build on Arceus quite a bit as far as the open world and catching elements went, but they did not adopt a lot of the turn based combat changes.
S and V were somewhat hamstrung by poor optimization and performance at launch, and I believe this is the reason much of the landscape looks so sparse. I would love to see a breakdown on why Zelda’s two most recent entries can look so grand at such a large scale and still get solid frame rates on the Switch while S and V cannot. Is it because of the game engines being used or some other rendering process that is less optimal?
I am a huge Pokémon fan, and I’ll be the first to admit that TPC needs to get their crap together. They need to hire the best software engineers and developers they can get that are cohesive with their team, embrace new gameplay ideas, rework their combat system in a way that is innovative and fresh (turn based is nice for younger kids who are playing games for the first time, but there are many other turn based approaches that could offer a larger variety in tactics), and overall step up the grand scale and quality of their games. I would love to see a compelling story with voice acting that can be disabled, game systems that are easy to use but offer masterful depth, improved multiplayer experiences, and difficulty scaling in some fashion so I don’t feel like the game gets to a medium difficulty 5 times in the entire playthrough.
Making games that can be enjoyed by all ages is very tough at times, but TPC has the resources to revitalize Pokémon and see insane record sales. I love what they have done to transition to an open world game that can be played alongside a friend, but it’s time they take the quality of the game up to 11 and stop peddling us low quality, under-baked attempts at something that could be so grand. You can have the soap box back now. 😅
It’s not going to flip. Tolleys derail all the time (ask people living in Wrocław). They can’t go fast enough to flip. It will just stop after couple of meters.
So now we have to check the global statistics and figure out what’s the probability is of someone dying in a derailment and estimate if we should risk it or just let the one guy die. Fun!
The people in the train are the only ones with any power to stop it, but they’re divided between “smash everyone quickly” and “smash everyone slowly” factions.
I saw that! Brick killed a guy! Did you throw a trident?
Yeah, there were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident!
Brick, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. You should find yourself a safehouse or a relative close by. Lay low for a while, because you’re probably wanted for murder.
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
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