• @CheeseNoodle
    link
    English
    12 hours ago

    Well their heads aren’t on the tracks and they’re immortal, I bet we could rig some kind of device to make them total praplegics and then work on a direct neural interface so they can use computers while they lay there endlessly having their bodies painlessly trisected.

  • @over_clox
    link
    English
    3619 hours ago

    The answer is obvious. You need 2 trolleys to take both tracks.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1015 hours ago

    I go for option 1.

    In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that’d be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either…

    • a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
    • death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
    • or - if it’s an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

    So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that’s just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      34 hours ago

      Yeah okay but by that logic you’d also have to quantize time and the suffering would end either way in a finite amount of time.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      212 hours ago

      Or is it like a Y2K death trolly and when the overflow happens the universe doesn’t catch the exception and things get weird. Like suddenly any number can be divided by 0.

  • @GrammarPolice
    link
    English
    14
    edit-2
    16 hours ago

    I’d do top case since the number of people killed would converge to -1/12 meaning no suffering

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    615 hours ago

    Cant you just take people from the track with reincarnating people? They might have to die a couple of times, but thats nothing compared to infinity

  • Tar_Alcaran
    link
    fedilink
    English
    817 hours ago

    Ah, but eventually the trolley breaks down, and in the case of the reincarnating circle, you end up with zero deaths (but a whole lot of Therapy)

  • Kogasa
    link
    fedilink
    English
    212 hours ago

    It can be, usually for college credit though

  • @5oap10116
    link
    English
    314 hours ago

    People really complaining about Calc 2?

  • stinerman [Ohio]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    718 hours ago

    Where I’m from Calc 2 is integrals. That wasn’t so terrible. It was Calc 3 (vectors and series) that was the hard one.

    • Codex
      link
      English
      416 hours ago

      I managed until university when I left calculus and entered “Linear Algebra” and man, I really don’t like matrices.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        16 minutes ago

        I found linear algebra super hard until I learned it a second and then third time, from different angles. I found it harder to understand when it was taught in a pure maths context, but coming at it from the applied side made me go “oh, so that’s why that’s like that”

      • stinerman [Ohio]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        410 hours ago

        I made it through. My degree is actually in math. 15 years ago, I used to know what an abelian group is!

    • Kogasa
      link
      fedilink
      English
      417 hours ago

      At the universities I went to, Calc 2 was integration, sequences and series, then Calc 3 was multivariable. They really pack all the harder parts into 2.

      • @someacnt_
        link
        English
        2
        edit-2
        13 hours ago

        I thought this was taught in high school. Curriculums differ drastically between countries, don’t they?

      • stinerman [Ohio]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        116 hours ago

        We were on quarters, so we had calc 1-4. Makes sense that Calc 2 was rough if you were on semesters.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    17 hours ago

    Arguably these are different amounts of bad even before considering this: We generally consider existing preferable to non-existence to some extent when suffering isnt taken into account, consider that if you murder someone quickly and painlessly in their sleep without waking them, they dont really themselves suffer from it, but people will still find you to be a murderer, and would object to the idea that you might do it to them. In the top example, killing the people actually kills them, but in the lower example, it arguably doesnt, because the experiences of the people involved never actually cease, therefore, the lower path seems to me to be preferable because you supposedly get equivalent amounts of “suffering”, but different amounts of time that people spend in non-existence.

    • Johanno
      link
      fedilink
      English
      716 hours ago

      Morally speaking people could argue that torturing immortal people is worse.

      However legally speaking to you don’t kill them and therefore the immortals are preferred.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          15 minutes ago

          Though I do wonder whether a sufficiently good lawyer could argue that it’s not attempted murder if you knew they were immortal

        • Johanno
          link
          fedilink
          English
          14 hours ago

          That would mean you did it on purpose. But you didn’t power the trolley. You “accidentally” flipped the switch… And left. Since you can’t do more.

  • @BreadOven
    link
    English
    618 hours ago

    I think the ones in the loop become Cenobites.

  • @j4k3
    link
    English
    618 hours ago

    The abominable billionaire loop makes me happy

  • @SidewaysHighways
    link
    English
    518 hours ago

    Hell couldn’t be real because humans would eventually fetishize any pain input and dump buckets forever.

    Some webcomic I saw back in the earlier days of the Internet

    • Queen HawlSera
      link
      fedilink
      English
      25 hours ago

      Allegedly it isn’t a place where you are tortured, but instead a state of permanent depression from being cut off from God. Just the former is easier for pop culture to portray.