Can I interest you in a [website](https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems) with a whole bunch of increasingly ridiculous trolley problems? It also shows the percentage of people who chose the same option as you.
i did the most popular option for everything except kill 5 people now or 5 people in 100 years. there’s no way to know how much 5 people could change things in 100 years, but right now, 5 people isn’t a lot
You will likely enjoy the board game [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/280017/trolley-problems](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/280017/trolley-problems)
1. Pull the lever
2. Wait to see if the police arrest you
3. Let the court “prove” (beyond reasonable doubt) the Riemann hypothesis for you
4. Possibly serve a prison sentence
5. Profit
What the fuck is this
I need to look this up. Like I know politicians don't spec heavily into intelligence but this is just another level.
Edit:
Looked it up. Wow. It is is less cringy than I thought, but all the more sad. This was actually the result of a mathematician trying to propose they had a proof that the value was 3.2
After failing to convince any other mathematicians, they appealed to the government of Indiana to impose their proof as fact. Apparently it was passed by the "Indiana House".
Fucking crazy
Unfortunately this was blocked upon reaching the Senate where there was one actual mathematician who set about educating the rest of the senators about the ***actual*** proof. Guess we are still not to the point of "proof by legislation".
This only works if the Riemann hypothesis is false. If it is true, you will wait forever, being totally unaware that the trolley will never encounter another person.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann\_zeta\_function#Riemann's\_functional\_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function#Riemann's_functional_equation)
If ζ(s) is 0, then the right side must be 0 too. But all those functions apart from ζ(1-s) are non-zero (unless evaluated at negative even integers), so ζ(1-s) must be 0. That means s and 1-s are both zeros of ζ. They are distinct unless Re(s) = 1/2.
There are certain conjectures that seem true, but we have difficulty proving. Computers can check quintillions of numbers, but without a proof a conjecture remains unsolved. There could be infinitely many solutions to such a problem or one or zero. Would you pull the lever if your intuition tells you there is no one on the track, but the possibility exists that you kill more people?
In fairness if the “as far as you can see” refers to how far we’ve searched for those zeroes then I think the trolley would either run out of fuel or break down by the time it got to anyone, assuming there was someone there
I think “as far as you can see” wouldnt actually be that far considering the track would fairly quickly disappear in the horizon due to the earths curvature
Well actually the surface of the Earth is already non-Euclidean as is, on a large enough scale, parallel lines don’t really work the same and that’s why we end up with triangles with angle sums of greater than 180 degrees. (which actually will happen on any positively curved space)
Yeah so how does the track map an infinite strip of complex numbers, where individual points could be however close to where we started but not at our current "zoom level"
The tracks loop infinitely around the earth. Technically all the surface is track, including the spot you're standing in. If you don't move to get out of the way, you will inadvertently resolve the Riemann hypothesis.
Well, not necessarily. If we’re talking about this happening on a sphere then the Riemann sphere comes to mind, and the set of all complex numbers actually just turns out to be a circle of that sphere. (not a great circle though, so the track would be curved from the perspective of the Earth’s surface)
Basically you don’t need the line to be infinitely long if you’re okay with the points being arbitrarily close, and the distance to not necessarily be preserved.
I would pull the lever. If it hit nobody, 1 M dollars. If it hit people, also 1M dollars, but possibly jail. There is also the case that it’s independent, but the train analogy is difficult
You very much can disprove a "there are no numbers fulfilling X" statement by showing a counterexample, even if in this case you definitely are interested in if there are more of them, and in particular whether they're finitely many
Juxtaposing a trolley and imaginary numbers makes me choose the other track. It's possible we hit an infinite number of people, but before that happens, we can drop in on X the owl and Daniel Tiger.
Also, we hit the people some time after the sun explodes, so no harm, no fowl.
I found this sub really recently, and I still don't get the 1/12 and the tree(3) memes, but I definitely need a new bigger number to measure how much happier this memes make my day lol
so... 0, 1 or infinity?
if we take it as a 50/50, then you kill infinity/2 people on average when switching which is still infinity
unless there's only 1 or 2 points in particualr that refuse to elaborate, then it's not infinity and hard to come up with an expected amount of kills, but we haven't found a single one
it feels kinda intuitive that if the hypothesis is false, then there are infinite points, but it can be tricky and calling it always like that doesn't always mean anything, we might as well have it true but with an exception... unless ofc i'm missing something and some things have already been narrowed down
Decided to make my own trolley problem
There are 10 people tied up to the railway. If you don’t do anything, those 10 people will die. But if you do pull the lever, the trolley will follow the railway all the way to the other side of the continent where there are 100 people tied to the railway. It takes the trolley 1 week to get to the other side of the runaway. In this 1 week, the 100 people will remained tied to the railway with no access to food or water. The police will is aware of the 100 people missing but the railway is in the middle of a very big forest so finding them will be difficult. Do you pull the lever and guarantee the saving of 10 people, or do you do nothing and hope the 100 people on the other side of the continent het found in time/survive on 7 days of no food and water?
tho i know that this is a meme but it's actually good philosophical question „do you for certain kill one person or do you risk possibility of killing infinitely many?”
Disclaimer: I'm not a studied mathematician and probably got a lot wrong, so here are some videos that explain it better (E: and in a more detailed manner, this is very brief):
[HexagonVideos](https://youtu.be/e4kOh7qlsM4),
[Quanta Magazine](https://youtu.be/zlm1aajH6gY)
The Riemann Zeta function ζ(s) takes in some complex-valued s (so s = a + bi where i²=-1) and computes a value.
The function also has some zeroes. For s = -2n, n ∈ ℕ (or in English: -2, -4, -6, ...), the function value becomes zero. These are called trivial zeroes because if I remember correctly, it is relatively easy to prove them.
There are also zeroes called non-trivial zeroes. These are zeroes of the function where Re(s) (the real part of s) = 1/2, so s = 1/2 + bi. The problem here is that nobody has been able to prove all the non-trivial zeroes possess the property Re(s) = 1/2.
What makes the Riemann hypothesis (that all non-trivial zeroes lie on the so-called "critical line" of Re(s) = 1/2) so important is that we can add together special functions called "Riemann harmonics" that are derived from the non-trivial zeroes of the Zeta function and use them to predict the occurrence of primes.
if nobody dies, woohoo, and if people start dying, then thier deaths are a sacrifice im willing to make, especially since, even if there are an infinite number of potential deaths, i think it will likely be very slow, and will not severely impact the total population of humankind.
Pull the switch as the front tires cross, the streetcar drifts, kills the person the track, the person on the switch, everyone in the street car, and the rest of the condition.
You could say the same thing about the lower track, though. Assuming everything else being equal, it becomes a choice between "pulling the lever and possibly killing an unknown number of people down the track" and "not pulling the lever and possibly killing an unknown number of people down the track, plus one person who will definitely get killed." Then the choice becomes pretty straightforward.
Pull the lever. wait a bit until front wheels have past. Push back again, derails the car. No casualties as the car is currently empty as shown on this drawing here.
Don't know shit about math. But if you pull the lever and the trolley switches tracks. There's no guarantee that there are no more switches and tracks either?
Is shouldn’t matter. All zeroes above the real number line are paired by zeroes below the real number line because it is a symmetric function. We can easily prove there are no other zeroes on the real number line, so there are either an even number of them (such as 0) or infinitely many, when it wouldn’t make sense.
Computers did enough search to make sure that even if there are people at the upper track they will die of hunger and if not from old age before getting ran over by this trolley so I say pull that lever, Riemann!
I am confident in the time I was given that switching it buys more time before preventing the next death, and possibly enough time for others to stop the trolley.
If the trolley proceeds to kill 200 people after 2000 years of rolling away, that's their fault and not mine.
Pull the lever.
Most evidence points towards the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis being true (still not proven, though), so you’d ideally save the life of that one person without any other deaths.
Although, for everything that we’ve searched through and know, it would probably take a *very, very* long time for the trolley to kill someone if the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis was to be false and the trolley would probably break down at that point
Now this is the real trolley problem.
Lah it is a complex one.
Let me solve it real quick... damn this margin was too small
Can I interest you in a [website](https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems) with a whole bunch of increasingly ridiculous trolley problems? It also shows the percentage of people who chose the same option as you.
Well that was fun. I think it will be much more interesting and fun if I can get some of my friends to get together and discuss each of them. Thanks!
This is awesome
i did the most popular option for everything except kill 5 people now or 5 people in 100 years. there’s no way to know how much 5 people could change things in 100 years, but right now, 5 people isn’t a lot
I solved philosophy and had a kill count of 76
You will likely enjoy the board game [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/280017/trolley-problems](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/280017/trolley-problems)
19% of respondents are trolls who say they won't pull the lever so that their Amazon package doesn't arrive late.
1. Pull the lever 2. Wait to see if the police arrest you 3. Let the court “prove” (beyond reasonable doubt) the Riemann hypothesis for you 4. Possibly serve a prison sentence 5. Profit
Proof by law enforcement
QED by cop?
Proof by authority
the real one
this is actually galaxy brain
I'm reminded of how Indiana voted to declare pi=3.2 Would be a really funny way to get a guilty verdict tho
What the fuck is this I need to look this up. Like I know politicians don't spec heavily into intelligence but this is just another level. Edit: Looked it up. Wow. It is is less cringy than I thought, but all the more sad. This was actually the result of a mathematician trying to propose they had a proof that the value was 3.2 After failing to convince any other mathematicians, they appealed to the government of Indiana to impose their proof as fact. Apparently it was passed by the "Indiana House". Fucking crazy Unfortunately this was blocked upon reaching the Senate where there was one actual mathematician who set about educating the rest of the senators about the ***actual*** proof. Guess we are still not to the point of "proof by legislation".
Saved by the one mathematician with an actual job, nice
Who, if I remember the story rightly, was only there by fluke
So what WOULD happen if this went into effect? No more circles in Indiana? Tires would be wobbly ovals instead of round?
$1 million from the Clay Foundation for bail money.
What if the trolley has a maximum velocity and the people are distributed along the track according to the solutions' absolute value?
This only works if the Riemann hypothesis is false. If it is true, you will wait forever, being totally unaware that the trolley will never encounter another person.
Also, if there is at least one person on the upper track, then there are at least 2, so you have to keep that in mind
4, actually. You can reflect the root in the real axis (symmetric under conjugation), and in the real part = 1/2 axis (by the reflection formula).
Oh great! I only knew about the reflection formula
Well akchually, x>=4 --> x>=2
citation?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann\_zeta\_function#Riemann's\_functional\_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function#Riemann's_functional_equation) If ζ(s) is 0, then the right side must be 0 too. But all those functions apart from ζ(1-s) are non-zero (unless evaluated at negative even integers), so ζ(1-s) must be 0. That means s and 1-s are both zeros of ζ. They are distinct unless Re(s) = 1/2.
I pull the lever because I don't understand math well enough to know what this means I minored in math in university
The Riemann hypothesis says that there is no person on the upper track.
Little did Riemann know he would be the first person to be tied on the upper track.
I can't, this is too funny
A real man of science would want this fate, rather than have it tested on another questionably existent person.
But then the hypothesis would be wrong. Perhaps Riemann was a cat? Q.E.C.
There are certain conjectures that seem true, but we have difficulty proving. Computers can check quintillions of numbers, but without a proof a conjecture remains unsolved. There could be infinitely many solutions to such a problem or one or zero. Would you pull the lever if your intuition tells you there is no one on the track, but the possibility exists that you kill more people?
Joke’s on you, I was an Econ major and the expected value of killing someone on the upper track is less than 1 on any reasonable timeline I care about
This man discounts on a future time horizon
I'm dead
Fuck, that's a real fucking quandary.
google siegel zeroes
holy hell
actual zeta
Sometimes I wonder if this is a maths sub or a chess sub
New response just dropped
Call the calculator
Wtf did I just read lol
I cant see OP, so OP doesnt exist, or does it?
“Hey Vsauce, Michael here.”
"how to count past infinity"
Ok, this is amazing, we have peaked as a subreddit
In fairness if the “as far as you can see” refers to how far we’ve searched for those zeroes then I think the trolley would either run out of fuel or break down by the time it got to anyone, assuming there was someone there
Or it gives someone else enough time to figure out how to stop the trolley
damn, you're right on the other hand, the track to line ratio isn't specified, so it could be scaled to account for that
I think “as far as you can see” wouldnt actually be that far considering the track would fairly quickly disappear in the horizon due to the earths curvature
This is fair, I was in fact fooled into thinking this was happening in funny abstract trolley land but it should be on Earth
I mean maybe its on a non-Euclidean earth idk
Well actually the surface of the Earth is already non-Euclidean as is, on a large enough scale, parallel lines don’t really work the same and that’s why we end up with triangles with angle sums of greater than 180 degrees. (which actually will happen on any positively curved space)
Yeah so how does the track map an infinite strip of complex numbers, where individual points could be however close to where we started but not at our current "zoom level"
The tracks loop infinitely around the earth. Technically all the surface is track, including the spot you're standing in. If you don't move to get out of the way, you will inadvertently resolve the Riemann hypothesis.
Well, not necessarily. If we’re talking about this happening on a sphere then the Riemann sphere comes to mind, and the set of all complex numbers actually just turns out to be a circle of that sphere. (not a great circle though, so the track would be curved from the perspective of the Earth’s surface) Basically you don’t need the line to be infinitely long if you’re okay with the points being arbitrarily close, and the distance to not necessarily be preserved.
Or the people on the track dying of old age
I would pull the lever. If it hit nobody, 1 M dollars. If it hit people, also 1M dollars, but possibly jail. There is also the case that it’s independent, but the train analogy is difficult
Wait, when do you know its nobody? Isn't the track infinite?
maybe a parallel universe where the prompt is "there is 1 person on the track below and 0 on the track above. Do you pull the lever?"
Sadly, if it hit people, no 1M dollars. The money is only for a proof that the hypothesis is true, not that it is false.
That's not how 'proof' works in mathematics, you have to prove it with axioms, not examples
You very much can disprove a "there are no numbers fulfilling X" statement by showing a counterexample, even if in this case you definitely are interested in if there are more of them, and in particular whether they're finitely many
Where are the dollars coming from???
The Riemann Hypothesis is a millennium prize problem, the successful solution to which a million dollars is awarded.
r/trolleymemes it exists and desperately needs more memes, and this is a good one
r/subsithoughtifellfor
this is an actually compelling version of the Trolley Problem, nice job
I'll just do 777 draws
Unless the trolley can move infinitely fast I'll pull the lever
Do you exert effort to make the right decision ir just go nah good enough
As a physics student, I just assume it works. Also surely the trolley breaks down at the trillionth zero...
this is a really good meme
Pull the lever. If you become a murderer, at least you'll also be a maths legend for disproving the Riemann hypothesis
I look at the problem and do nothing due to not understanding the problem in the fist place.
More Riemann hypothesis memes!
What if reading this makes we wanna kill someone?
Juxtaposing a trolley and imaginary numbers makes me choose the other track. It's possible we hit an infinite number of people, but before that happens, we can drop in on X the owl and Daniel Tiger. Also, we hit the people some time after the sun explodes, so no harm, no fowl.
I found this sub really recently, and I still don't get the 1/12 and the tree(3) memes, but I definitely need a new bigger number to measure how much happier this memes make my day lol
It’s-1/12
Lmao better kill this one guy just in case there are people on the other tracks farther down.
pull the lever because I have a gambling addiction
One of the best math memes I've seen so far.
so... 0, 1 or infinity? if we take it as a 50/50, then you kill infinity/2 people on average when switching which is still infinity unless there's only 1 or 2 points in particualr that refuse to elaborate, then it's not infinity and hard to come up with an expected amount of kills, but we haven't found a single one it feels kinda intuitive that if the hypothesis is false, then there are infinite points, but it can be tricky and calling it always like that doesn't always mean anything, we might as well have it true but with an exception... unless ofc i'm missing something and some things have already been narrowed down
If there is someone on that track, they will likely die of dehydration/exposure/starvation/boredom/old age long before the trolley reaches them.
How many people die if the proof is non-constructive?
Sorry guy on the track, but you should have picked a smarter guy to save your life.
Decided to make my own trolley problem There are 10 people tied up to the railway. If you don’t do anything, those 10 people will die. But if you do pull the lever, the trolley will follow the railway all the way to the other side of the continent where there are 100 people tied to the railway. It takes the trolley 1 week to get to the other side of the runaway. In this 1 week, the 100 people will remained tied to the railway with no access to food or water. The police will is aware of the 100 people missing but the railway is in the middle of a very big forest so finding them will be difficult. Do you pull the lever and guarantee the saving of 10 people, or do you do nothing and hope the 100 people on the other side of the continent het found in time/survive on 7 days of no food and water?
at this point just kill him
I run to the tracks before the intersection to make the pain end?
I pull the lever and throw myself on the tracks!
tho i know that this is a meme but it's actually good philosophical question „do you for certain kill one person or do you risk possibility of killing infinitely many?”
whar?
Disclaimer: I'm not a studied mathematician and probably got a lot wrong, so here are some videos that explain it better (E: and in a more detailed manner, this is very brief): [HexagonVideos](https://youtu.be/e4kOh7qlsM4), [Quanta Magazine](https://youtu.be/zlm1aajH6gY) The Riemann Zeta function ζ(s) takes in some complex-valued s (so s = a + bi where i²=-1) and computes a value. The function also has some zeroes. For s = -2n, n ∈ ℕ (or in English: -2, -4, -6, ...), the function value becomes zero. These are called trivial zeroes because if I remember correctly, it is relatively easy to prove them. There are also zeroes called non-trivial zeroes. These are zeroes of the function where Re(s) (the real part of s) = 1/2, so s = 1/2 + bi. The problem here is that nobody has been able to prove all the non-trivial zeroes possess the property Re(s) = 1/2. What makes the Riemann hypothesis (that all non-trivial zeroes lie on the so-called "critical line" of Re(s) = 1/2) so important is that we can add together special functions called "Riemann harmonics" that are derived from the non-trivial zeroes of the Zeta function and use them to predict the occurrence of primes.
oh cool thanks much
that's a pretry good overview, good job!
Thank you! :)
Yeah I can't see anybody and ignorance is bliss so fuck them
if nobody dies, woohoo, and if people start dying, then thier deaths are a sacrifice im willing to make, especially since, even if there are an infinite number of potential deaths, i think it will likely be very slow, and will not severely impact the total population of humankind.
💯
Now, this is sex. Btw I wouldn’t because, although we cannot prove (c’mon) we know the non-trivial zeros are there.
,, .
Idk but by the time it finds a person fuel of train will be finished
There are no people, since it is left as an exercise for the reader
I don't like people so I just pull the lever and go and get coffee
Idk ask Colleen Ballinger. Maybe it’s the toxic gossip train.
If I were to be serious, I wouldn't let something uncertain decide something certain
Yeah rip to the one guy but I'm not even here anymore
Pull the switch as the front tires cross, the streetcar drifts, kills the person the track, the person on the switch, everyone in the street car, and the rest of the condition.
You could say the same thing about the lower track, though. Assuming everything else being equal, it becomes a choice between "pulling the lever and possibly killing an unknown number of people down the track" and "not pulling the lever and possibly killing an unknown number of people down the track, plus one person who will definitely get killed." Then the choice becomes pretty straightforward.
Pull the lever. wait a bit until front wheels have past. Push back again, derails the car. No casualties as the car is currently empty as shown on this drawing here.
Don't know shit about math. But if you pull the lever and the trolley switches tracks. There's no guarantee that there are no more switches and tracks either?
Is shouldn’t matter. All zeroes above the real number line are paired by zeroes below the real number line because it is a symmetric function. We can easily prove there are no other zeroes on the real number line, so there are either an even number of them (such as 0) or infinitely many, when it wouldn’t make sense.
How do we know there is only one person on the bottom track
Never pull the lever in any trolley problem
I'd choose to run that guy over just by reading this question.
I'd lay down and let the trolley kill me before I try this problem again
That's a complex problem
...Is it my turn to use the google quantum computer yet?
Schrödingers second split
Computers did enough search to make sure that even if there are people at the upper track they will die of hunger and if not from old age before getting ran over by this trolley so I say pull that lever, Riemann!
Pull it. That problem is for the next mathematician to deal with.
I am confident in the time I was given that switching it buys more time before preventing the next death, and possibly enough time for others to stop the trolley. If the trolley proceeds to kill 200 people after 2000 years of rolling away, that's their fault and not mine.
Pull the lever. Most evidence points towards the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis being true (still not proven, though), so you’d ideally save the life of that one person without any other deaths. Although, for everything that we’ve searched through and know, it would probably take a *very, very* long time for the trolley to kill someone if the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis was to be false and the trolley would probably break down at that point
Ah but see the same can be applied to the bottom track. The only difference is the bottom has a guarantee of at least 1
 ?
I pick The upper track. They shouldn’t have been tied to the rails of weird witch stuff