A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Did nobody have math class? The pictures are always misleading!
It never actually specifies the density the people are packed onto the track, the image implies an answer.
I'd argue that the densities should be considered to be equal, regardless of whatever that density value may be. We do not need to solve for the exact value to discuss the problem at hand!
Jump in front of the trolley, someone else's problem
Would suck being the last person on either track. It'd be a long and boring wait while tied up
This comment section is politics in action! :-P
i love stirring the pot.
If you want to be a true masochist, you could re-run the experiment on Reddit - hurk 🤮.
The beauty of Lemmy is that here we can at least talk about such neat things:-).
If we have infinite people, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to lose a couple.
Infinity cannot be divided, if it can then it becomes multiple finite objects. Therefore there cannot be multiple Infinities. If infinity has a size, then it is a finite object. If infinity has a boundary of any kind, then it is a finite object.
I'm not entirely sure I understand your comment, but the fact that there are more real numbers than natural numbers can be readily shown using something called cantor's diagonal argument. It goes something like this:
Suppose the set of real numbers and natural numbers had the same size. Then we could write down an infinite list, where each line represents some real number written in it's decimal representation. So something like
1: 3.14159265
2: 1.41421356
3: 0.24242424
...
This list goes on forever. We will now construct a new real number r as follows: The first number after the decimal point of r shall be different from the first number after the decimal point of the first number in our list, the second shall be different from the second decimal of the second number on the list, and so on (the name diagonal argument comes from this, we consider the entries on the diagonal from top left towards the bottom right).
The key point now is that this constructed real number is different from every single number on the list: After all, we have made sure it differs from each number on the list in at least one place. Therefore, it is impossible to write down the real numbers in such a way that each real number gets its own natural number: There are simply too few natural numbers for this. In particular, there are at least two different "sizes" of infinities.
I get that the answer is supposed to be "it doesn't matter" but if you take time into account, it actually fucking does, and also makes it hugely obvious what the actual answer is.
from the picture this is true but from the statement alone both options are identical
i'd ask for a second train.
Pull the lever. Save as many lives as you can and hope that someone that now wasn't killed as fast can help come up with a solution for the runaway trolley.
If the tracks are scaled to the same unit (presumably one where one human width equals an infinitely small number), everyone in the top track would die of exposure before the trolley even reaches its first victim due to there being infinite distance between integer milestones, whereas everyone in the bottom track would be killed instantly due to any distance traveled having an infinite number of infinitesimals*. So I choose the bottom track to be merciful.
If the tracks don't share the same scale then we don't have enough information to make a judgment.
* Even though we already established the one human width rule. Could someone check my logic here? Infinities break my brain.
I am sure even countably infinite people would violate some law of thermodynamics.
Some infinities are bigger than others but those are both the same sized infinity, ℵ₀. Same if you multi-track drift.
Edit: I didn't read it closely enough, it says "one person for every real number". Which is indeed a larger infinity. However I don't think you can diagram that, the diagram is showing a countable infinity of people on the lower track.
Killing one person for each real number, the train will be killing an uncountably infinite quantity of people in any given finite time slice.
I pull the lever and invoke Zeno's paradox to ensure the trolley's position remains < 1 for eternity.
EDIT: I rolled a critical fail in reading comprehension and I thought the other track was N per integer instead of 1 per real number in the previous version of this comment.
The people in the real number track are already dead by the time the trolley arrives due to the forces involved in cramming them so tightly together. I.e. they are basically just a gore pile the moment after the people are somehow arranged like that.
I pick the real number track so that no one new has to die.
I'll do nothing. Either way those people will eventually die - because of the train or because of starvation and dehydration. I would prefer the train.
Pull it -1/12 of the way, causing the infinity to converge to a real number.
build new tracks to make the trolley run on (possibly in circles).
The same thing most people would do when presented with a Trolly Problem for real. Analysis paralysis, choose to do nothing, then cry softly every night for the rest of my life.