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Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

> Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. The lever just speeds up the trolley, which might make it less painful. What do you do?

I voted no, cause really? who the hell would SPEED UP a train to hit someeone because it 'might' make it less painful. Disregarding the million other mights that could be assumed. The logic here is astounding & yet.

33% of people agree with you, 67% disagree (20,485 votes)

I guess the lesson here is people act on assumptions as tho they are fact.

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I was surprised about that one as well. Here is another assumption: Speeding up the train might reduce their chance of being saved by a third party. So by speeding up the trolley you might make it less painful, but also might rob them of the chance of being saved. I know this is just a thought experiment, but there are a million variables to a scenario like this and just adjusting for the first one you see is a slippery slope.

A lot of the problems are structured as parallels to real world problems. While strictly speaking I voted "do nothing" for that problem, I wholeheartedly support the real world parallel which is euthanasia (speeding up the trolley to reduce the pain of inevitable death).

It's going to happen anyway, so there's a net positive effect of speeding it up. I can't imagine people not choosing to do so.

> I guess the lesson here is people act on assumptions as tho they are fact.

As I wrote above: these problems are too artificial to draw real conclusions. They're thought experiments. The only information you can use is given. For the rest, you have to fall back to "defaults" (each life is worth the same, etc.).

If you look at it like that, it's interesting to see how many people would opt to run over the rich man.

I voted to speed it up. "I don't know everything so I remain cautious" is a mentality I applied for some problems, and not for others. In this case I thought the problem would be trivial/boring if considered from that mentality, so I instead made a choice between condemning someone to a 10 second life of 10/10 pain and condemning someone to a 5 second life of 5/10 pain.

Also voted no, felt like pulling the lever would mean I took part in the inevitable killing, even if the outcome was the same. It would also remove precious time needed for the victims to recount their lives and come to terms with their situation before dying.

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