this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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It's not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it's still barely even a choice.
"Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?"
If you can't choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it's my kid versus a billion? That's not a choice, that's just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
So a more interesting dilemma would have been "would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.". Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes "do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?". Even more interestingly "limiting the damage now" makes you the "psycho" in that sense...
The fact of the game never ending is what made the choice too easy, you're right.
EDITED
For this study you want sociopathy, not psychopathy. I can report from my wasted psych degree that sociopathy occurs in 1-2% of the population.
Binary probability tells us that if you repeat a 1% chance test 32 times, you have a 95% chance of never seeing it.
Don't pull the lever. Sorry for the ninja edit, I misread something.
I'm confused: 0.99^32 = 0.72, not 0.95. And if you know that everyone except the last guy won't pull the lever, that's still a 1% chance of killing everyone on earth (average expected deaths: 70 million) is way worse than definitely killing one person!
(Edit: unless "don't pull the lever" means killing that one person, because it isn't clear which is the default "no action" outcome. In which case, never mind.)
(Edit 2: if you know the 34th and last person might be a sociopath, you're best off if the first 27 people might also be sociopaths.)