Pulling the Lever in a Subway Problem

pavel_lishin an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently. On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour, perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people 1hr / 16 / 365 = 4.3y).*

I am not convinced by these kinds of calculations, and I think they generally do rationalists & their like a big disfavor.

A year of someone's life is approximately 9,000 hours.

If you spend an hour commuting to work and back for 30+ years, that's approximately the same amount of time.

But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.)

I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.

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mikebenfield 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

But you completely changed the scenario in an absurd way?

The original setup was spending time in line vs having usable, productive time.

You changed it to spending time in line vs the time just vanishes.

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phkahler 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The genie transports to work, not time travel. You do whatever you want right up til work time and then teleport there.

	▲	argee 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What GP is saying is that your scenario is strictly worse. You meant to argue that commute time is not seen as equivalent to "lifespan time" since no one would make your trade, but in fact your trade is deleting time from a life entirely in exchange for commute whereas commute time may still otherwise be spent somewhat productively (e.g. listening to a podcast, calling your family, or whatever). The difference between someone who accepted this bargain and not, is that the person who accepted the bargain has in fact less productive time overall (because it got deleted in the bargain), so of course no one will make the trade. When I say "deleted" I'm talking about the lifespan reduction, I understand your commute becomes "instant".

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pessimizer 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

edit: Nah, I was even misreading it - it's just saying exactly the same thing that objectors are saying. Commute time isn't worth nothing, and people wouldn't trade it 1:1 for time not spent commuting.

I'd comment by saying that human life math, and X% disability math etc., though absurd, has to be done when you have a say over how lives and health will be spent. There will always be death panels.

The best you can do is make your calculations explicit, so other people can express how they object to them and how they would do them differently. But there's no inherent or consistent value to a life or a handicap. Your dying would hurt you more than it would hurt me, and would affect your children in ways in which I wouldn't be affected; and losing the use of one's legs would be worse for an NBA player than for a computer programmer. Losing an index finger could be nearly like death to a guitarist.

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pessimizer 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.

I think that this is closer than you think and would be debatable. If somebody told me that a 1.5-2 hour commute five days a week would go to zero for the rest of my life, and I just had to give up the last year of it, I'd probably take that deal.

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nancyminusone 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

And what of the similar delay incurred when someone's arm does get ripped off? It's not like the train is just going to keep going on with it's regularly scheduled day. Paramedics will be called, the train will be stopped.

Besides that, this happened 11 years ago. Probably everyone involved has collectively wasted that 4.3 years just by not optimizing their time to within 1 second per day (11 years = 4015 days = 1.11 hr for each second wasted)

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flerchin 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Excellent trolley problem. Living with your decisions is unavoidable. I would be able to live with "I stopped a train because I wasn't sure if someone was about to be maimed."

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kmoser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.

This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).

	▲	Hinrik an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case). For the curious, I recommend reading some recent reexaminations of the Kitty Genovese case. Most people's perception of it is as a demonstration of the bystander effect, but if you look more closely, that is not a very honest take of what happened. That angle however is something that shocks people and grabs attention, which makes it a very successful meme. Rutget Bregman writes about this in his book Humankind, as well as other similar cases. Some snippets of it can be found online.

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indoordin0saur an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone who rode the L train this morning on their commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan knows whats up.

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empath75 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.

	▲	Ukv 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. If it's expected/uninteresting for someone to hit the brake when someone shouts at them to do so, then is it not interesting to consider why the opposite happened in this case? ("I pointed to the person next to it and shouted [...] They didn't, so I ran down the train") > You don't work out some complicated moral calculus. Which I think is think is one of the author's points, that "morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options" and that doesn't match reality.

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bob1029 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The fact that this is a "problem" is telling.

I think a lot of people have been quietly traumatized by propaganda around authority and consequences. There's an unlimited amount of this content on social media platforms.

If you can't quickly run the min/max on consequences for pulling a subway emergency brake, you probably shouldn't be allowed to ride the subway without some kind of exception on file.

	▲	exmadscientist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think that when people are really put in to these kinds of situations, you'll find that you don't do what you thought you would. (Assuming the situtation is actually new to you -- no fair if you already know.) Which is really interesting! You might do "better" than past you expected. You might do "worse". You might just do "different". But it will very rarely be what you expected you would do. I know it surprised me when something similar happened to me. (But, alas, not a particularly good story.) And so I think that's worthy of discussion.