Isn’t the trolly also reducing carbon emissions by killing so many people? With enough of these questions, it will be able to reduce the world’s population to zero, at which point there should be no carbon emissions from humans.

Decomposition emits carbon, right? Let's fire everyone into interplanetary space to be sure we solved the problem.

You can run the trolley into a giant vat of molten glass that would pour over all the dead bodies of humanity and freeze them from decomposing into the atmosphere. (note that the energy used to create this large vat of glass was from renewables)

You know, that's a very good question...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

I'm kind of shocked that 2020 vs 2019 is a 7.1% INCREASE. Most people spent a lot of the year indoors traveling much less than usual. Curious.

Much has been said about this: https://www.vox.com/22675358/us-car-deaths-year-traffic-covi...

The gist is that we design our streets in such a way that people drive dangerously fast on them when they’re not slowed down by congestion, and during the pandemic that’s exactly what happened. Some other countries (particularly in Western Europe) take a safe systems approach to street design and did not have the same uptick in fatalities that we did.

Thank you for the interesting article. I started skimming it after a little bit though and my eyes happened to pick up this line out of context. What a name to go with that quote:

"“They were just sick and tired of kids being killed in the streets,” says Jason Slaughter"

This also leads to a trolley problem!

Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...

...pull the lever and...

Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.

People also cause pollution, so it might be less polluting in the long run to keep the trolley.

But more seriously, I just realised that this is actually an argument that's often used against various environmental measures. People argue against wind turbines because they kill birds, ignoring the fact that pollution from fossil fuel kills far more, and birds are killed in larger numbers by other causes (cars, windows, cats). But somehow inaction seems more moral to some people if that action still leads to some deaths. Same with a multitude of other social issues.

If I remember correctly the original trolley problem was actually two problems. One was "pull the lever to kill one person instead of five" the other was "push someone onto the tracks (killing them) to stop the trolley and save five people".

More people were in favor of pulling the lever than there were in favor of pushing someone onto the tracks. This indeed hints that the more direct action, the harsher the judgement.

Yep, the original is "pull the lever to kill on person instead of five" and there are many many more variations with more direct action. The pure utilitarian will still choose the "kill one instead of five" no matter the situation. But some variations come up with things like: "you are a doctor with 5 patients who need 5 different organ transplants and are going to do die, do you kill the hospital janitor to harvest their organs to save 5 people"

LMAO. That's a very simple and senseful answer I missed to think of.

Curious if that would end the game (though not enough to try again)

It doesn’t. I wasn’t trying to make serious philosophical choices I was just having fun and picking whatever amused me.

I bounced after hitting level 21. Did you get to the end?

Yeah level 28 is the last level. Just a few more situations and then you get an end screen that says “congratulations you have solved philosophy!”