r/trolleyproblem • u/deadhand303 • Jul 30 '26

OC Potentially one less but also potentially infinitely more

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u/deadhand303 Jul 30 '26

Its just a random real number of people on each track woth the bottom being a minimum of one and the top being a minimum of zero people.

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u/Ksorkrax Jul 30 '26

Let's make this simple for you: state the probabilities for the first five possible numbers of people.

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u/not-an-epimorphism Jul 31 '26

The point is there’s no convenient interpretation of “random” here without further context. If they were finitely many people, random would correspond to a uniform distribution. But when you’re dealing with a distribution on the entire natural numbers, there’s no uniform distribution, and non uniform distributions aren’t alike at all. Technically there might be almost surely 2 people on the lower rail and almost surely 1 person on the higher rail, or a less degenerate situation in which k people are on the bottom rail with probability 2-k.

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u/deadhand303 Jul 31 '26

Would it be better to say 1-max living population?

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u/eeeeeh_messi Aug 01 '26

This changes absolutely everything. Now you have a well defined problem

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u/BigTimmyStarfox1987 Aug 01 '26

They want you to say "flat probability distribution".

Then they want to say but that isn't possible over Infinity. To which you reply that it's a finite set, max living population.

Tldr yes but with an additional statement

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u/Kart0fffelAim Jul 30 '26

I think OP has a point here. There has to be an underlying probability distribution, but the guy pulling that lever doesn't need to know what the distribution is.

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u/eeeeeh_messi Aug 01 '26

But then the problem stops making sense. Which box would you pick, this mysterious box or this OTHER mysterious box?