A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Did nobody have math class? The pictures are always misleading!
It never actually specifies the density the people are packed onto the track, the image implies an answer.
I'd argue that the densities should be considered to be equal, regardless of whatever that density value may be. We do not need to solve for the exact value to discuss the problem at hand!
Would suck being the last person on either track. It'd be a long and boring wait while tied up
Jump in front of the trolley, someone else's problem
I know many people despise generative AI, but what do you think of this result from Copilot? I am bad at maths so I wonder if you experts can tell.
In your scenario, you have two sets: the integers on the top track and the real numbers on the bottom track. The cardinality of the integers is equal to the cardinality of the real numbers, which is called the continuum hypothesis. Therefore, it seems intuitively more ethical to pull the lever and divert the trolley to the bottom track, where you kill fewer people in any finite time.
It's completely wrong within ZF set theory the cardinality of the integers is stricly smaller than the cardinality of the real numbers. The continuum hypothesis states that there is no set with a cardinality strictly larger than the natural numbers (or integers) and strictly smaller than the real numbers.
It accidentally kind of comes to the right conclusion, but even the conclusion isn't really correct, you don't need to be concerned with finite time since integers are a smaller cardinality.
Let's say people can be placed on a point on the track indexed by the real numbers, given any two seperate, finite, points, there would be more people packed between those two points than the entire integer track.
it seems intuitively more ethical to pull the lever and divert the trolley to the bottom track,
not an expert but the integer one is at the top i think
This comment section is politics in action! :-P
i love stirring the pot.
If you want to be a true masochist, you could re-run the experiment on Reddit - hurk 🤮.
The beauty of Lemmy is that here we can at least talk about such neat things:-).
If we have infinite people, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to lose a couple.
Some infinities are bigger than others but those are both the same sized infinity, ℵ₀. Same if you multi-track drift.
Edit: I didn't read it closely enough, it says "one person for every real number". Which is indeed a larger infinity. However I don't think you can diagram that, the diagram is showing a countable infinity of people on the lower track.
Killing one person for each real number, the train will be killing an uncountably infinite quantity of people in any given finite time slice.
EDIT: I rolled a critical fail in reading comprehension and I thought the other track was N per integer instead of 1 per real number in the previous version of this comment.
The people in the real number track are already dead by the time the trolley arrives due to the forces involved in cramming them so tightly together. I.e. they are basically just a gore pile the moment after the people are somehow arranged like that.
I pick the real number track so that no one new has to die.
i'd ask for a second train.
If the tracks are scaled to the same unit (presumably one where one human width equals an infinitely small number), everyone in the top track would die of exposure before the trolley even reaches its first victim due to there being infinite distance between integer milestones, whereas everyone in the bottom track would be killed instantly due to any distance traveled having an infinite number of infinitesimals*. So I choose the bottom track to be merciful.
If the tracks don't share the same scale then we don't have enough information to make a judgment.
* Even though we already established the one human width rule. Could someone check my logic here? Infinities break my brain.
Infinity people always die. Even if you don't make a decision.
99% hitler vs. 100% hitler
US_electoral_politics.jpg
I am sure even countably infinite people would violate some law of thermodynamics.
I pull the lever and invoke Zeno's paradox to ensure the trolley's position remains < 1 for eternity.
Invent a new number system that provides aneven smaller infinity
Pull the lever. Save as many lives as you can and hope that someone that now wasn't killed as fast can help come up with a solution for the runaway trolley.