Honestly I would. Like I wouldn't hesitate to kill patient zero of a world ending disease.

Do you know any of the people involved?

2^32^ is roughly four billion. We'll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.

This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.

As long as everyone doubles there will be no deaths.

Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.

You didn't kill that person, the person who invented the problem did.

Philosophy is easy.

How fast is the train going can I make it to the person who's tied down and lay with them

Maybe there is nobody tied up after the third split, nobody explicitly stated it continues!

You'll eventually have to include alien life. What a great way to see if aliens exist!

This is also Thanos wet dream come true. Keep racking up the "pass"!

After person 33 there won't be any more humans to tie to the rails

Edit: which was pointed more subtly by OP in the title

Everyone just doubles it and we're good

I'd get it done and over with. I would resent myself forever, and accept any punishment for it, but it's better than waiting to see if someone wants to decide to kill off half the world later on. Would be even easier if I could take the first persons spot on the tracks so there only has to be one messed up person rather than two.

What happens if you are both to be killed and must flip the switch?

Schrödingers murder: You are both a murder and not a murder. You are not a murderer as you did not choose to kill a person, but as this can not continue forever you are also a murderer since it is quite certain that eventually someone will choose murder.

I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn't go on infinitely. Hear me out:

When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is 0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let's consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they'd have to pull the lever with likelihood x so that x * 2^33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1 which would lead to x = 1/2^33 or about x≈0.0000000001. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I'd guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above 1/2^33, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is 'only' one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.

I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(

The trolley problem thought experiment does a whole lot of work to define personal responsibility. IRL it's difficult to be the guy who does the evil thing for a good outcome, and easy to kick the can to the next guy, even while making it worse.

The optimal solution to the trolley problem is always the one that makes the least sense because the more chaos injected into any system the less predictable the results will be.

So I pull it, kill the other person at the second lever, and drag throw the person from the first set of tracks to the place where the train switches tracks. wrench the lever free from the top part and place it on the tracks where the train would switch too.

Fucked if I know what the outcome is.

Is this some kind of IPv6 joke that's gone over my head?

I wouldn’t. The likeliness of the next person choosing to kill even more people decreases fast with each iteration. And, I believe we can find 30 people who aren’t willing to become mass murderers pretty easily, even if they are selected randomly

I would, because the second track potentially scales to infinity, and pulling the lever is the only sure way to minimize the death and suffering.

Also, if everyone avoids pulling the lever, you technically have an infinite amount of people who will die and an infinite amount of guilty consciences, also an infinite amount of people blaming the last guy for forcing the decision on them, like the most messed up version of the infinity hotel.

Also, the infinity of people who die is also significantly larger and less quantifiable than the number of leaver guys.

You try to save them all by tackling the guy on the second track. The train is 400m from the wye in the track but 375m from the point the second person can decide to flip the switch. You are 270m from the second person. The train travels at a steady 15m/s. You start running at an acceleration of 0.5m/s/s. Can you tackle the second person to prevent them from flipping the switch? Assume flipping the switch means killing the poor tied up folks.

I dunno. I just made up numbers though.

at some point you run of people to man the switch and prevent the trolley from hitting the people?

I woukd kill the poor guy without hesitation. I am not letting that shit get out of hand.

With everybody tied up before the 34th track, who exactly is there to push the lever?