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Now this is my kind of meme; it actually gets into the details and complexity of the scenario it’s discussing - while still making fun of it and keeping the meme feel - rather than just simplifying it to the point where it looks straightforward, killing most of the important discussion.
i disagree this meme sucks i hate having to think when i look at memes much less read 🙄
What’s a trolley?
No clue because my country removed all meaningful mass transit to support corporate interests.
No lies detected.
Unfortunately, this setup is not in practice different from the simplified model we usually work with, which is why we work with it.
yeah i find nuanceposting is valuable 90% because it makes the petty pedants shut up by not giving them a shred of ambiguity to fang on to
i consider it a personal victory that no one has accused me of being a genocide supporter in this thread yet, for example. unfortunately not the story for those who’ve posted more simplified models
I’ve given it some thought, and noticed a flaw: most if not all third parties have people on the track regardless. The “Party for Socialism and Liberation” (the most ML psy-op party I’ve looked into this season) has Ukraine on the tracks, for instance.
Correct and this was on purpose, see this thread for reasoning :)
This is much better than the earlier version that just called everyone stupid.
Ok now do one that shows nice long tracks. And where if you vote to destroy the country, they stop sending weapons around the world to kill everyone when there is a local civil war happening.
Now how many people outside the US borders are being murdered at a point in the future?
Wanna pull your hair out?
Republicans are technically the third party in terms of registration numbers.
It’s just that registered independents don’t mobilize as a political unit, so the fact that they jostle with the dems for first and second place in registrations doesn’t matter because the Republicans have the organization and systemic rigging to negate being in a position in America in terms of actual popularity more comparable to Canada’s NDP or Bloc Québécois.
me rn: 👩🦲
You don’t need 46% to defeat 48%. If you strategically target specific cities you can win the presidency with about 20,000 votes.
How
The American electoral system is turbofucked.
He changed his post, originally it said you could win with 20,000 votes across the country.
Sorry, I misremembered. It’s 22% of the vote. CGP Grey explains how
You edited your post so it looks like I’m doubting your edit.
Edited for clarity
this is possibly the best summary for US politics
i know and i want to scream, thank you for the feedback
Great, now set everything on fire to represent climate change? 🔥
Somehow those old movies where villains wanted to reduce the population of the planet are actually happening irl… 😞
yes everything is on fire and track 1 has a few extinguishers but not enough.
track 3 has an indeterminate amount of fire hydrants because i think it depends on which party actually gets the seat.
track 2’s extinguishers have gasoline in them 😭
Also, 95-99% of the time your vote doesn’t matter for… “reasons”. Including other votes (e.g. a liberal President paired against a conservative Congress), older votes (especially Supreme Court appointments), and non-votes (corporations are in control regardless of who or which party “wins”), etc.
One lever pull event barely scratches the surface - we did not get ourselves into this mess in a day or even a decade, and it would take even more effort to get ourselves out.
And somehow, even knowing that, the Democratic party went all-in on Hillary fucking Clinton, smh. Americans are basically responsible people, and we can count on everyone to eat their veggies, r-r-right!? Even without bothering to campaign, R-R-RIGHT!?
Trump did not even want to win - he was as much a symptom as he later fed that forward to become a cause himself.
Therefore I think that “we”, the people who put effort into thinking things through, deeply, need to wake up and stop wishing and hoping that things will work out as we all hope and dream. Except that despite me saying “we”, that’s as far as I’ve gotten, so really truly it does not include me, who is merely a backseat onlooker hoping for my favorite team to win but offering little help along those lines to cause it:-). I don’t know what the next step is regarding the latter, but I offer kudos for trying to get people to understand regardless:-).
track 2’s extinguishers have gasoline in them
Wouldn’t that make them “tinguishers”?
Just wanted to let you know that got a legitimate snort out of me :)
technically yes but the Republican party calls them extinguishers in order to fool voters that are concerned yet poorly educated about climate issues
Don’t forget, they also then demand that their supporters ignore the very obvious fact that gasoline is coming out of the extinguishers. After all, those voters wouldn’t want everyone thinking they were a librul, now would they?
Painfully accurate
Not in picture: a burning freight train is hurling towards our trolley and will overtake us if we loose any momentum from running over the children.
Sure, except the third party track loops back to the R track because we live in a 2-party system.
Correct, I have this expressed with the line:
Track 3 promises no death at all, but if collaborative action fails, track 2 wins due to a more cohesive bloc and everyone has to watch their children die.
…This, honestly, sounds like less of a trolley problem and more of a prisoners dilemma. As in, if
everyoneenough people defect, you get track 2, if enough people don’t defect, you get track 3, and track 1 is if it’s in between.Of course, the problem, then, is that it would imply the people aiming for track 2 will defect, people aiming for track 3 won’t, and people aiming for track 1 would try to convince people not to defect, while defecting themselves.
You’re not wrong. Especially with the fact that copious capital goes into political campaigning from all sides; it’s kind of like a prisoner’s dilemma where the prisoners can communicate—for a price but both tracks 1 and 2 are well funded by corporate interest while 3 is just kind of left to fend for itself.
Quiet you! If you say anything else we’ll get flooded with the trolley/prisoner fusion experiment spam from reddit!
It’s the rightful punishment for misuse of philosophical thought experiments.
The minute you have to make up new rules to it- is the minute you admit you don’t understand how it works.
It’s not a moral dilemma if you can go outside of its confines to solve it.
If you hadn’t skipped half your classes you’d know that adding new rules/complexity to the trolley problem is literally half the point of it
No, it really isn’t. The problem is exactly as it’s stated. You don’t get to add new tracks. You just deal with the choices given.
You can’t make up rules about making up rules man. That’s not how any of this works.
You have been misinformed. The original researchers made multiple forms of the trolley problem to research the effects of different scenarios on people’s moral reasoning. Since then there have been dozens of forms of the trolley problem on surveys and research papers. The entire point is to change the scenario.
Even the “classic” dilemma that you’re used to with the man being on the side of the tracks with a switch is a variation on the original trolley problem which had the person being the trolley operator inside the trolley.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
You can’t just make up rules about not making up rules man. That’s not how any of this works.
Perhaps we are taking the trolley problem too seriously in the comments. The trolley problem is not meant to be a model for analysis nor a relevant dilemma in all ethical discussions. It was a way to illustrate the objections a philosopher (Philppa Foot) had against certain ethical approaches. It is, at best, a thought experiment with many limitations.
Parenthesis. Just as in physics where you may find people supporting either quantum mechanics or general relativity; in psychology where you may find people more inclined to behaviorist, humanist or psychodynamic therapy models; you have ethicists (moral philosophers) sometimes divided between deontology and utilitarianism. If I remember correctly, Philippa Foot was trying to demonstrate these mainstream approaches loops/problems with this hypothetical scenario, as she supported a different school of thought other than these two (one called virtue ethics). Also worth noting that just as in these disciplines and many others you also find attempts to “reconcile” apparently incompatible ‘theories’ (or whatever the case), you find the same in ethics (moral philosophy).
Back to topic, the trolley problem has become a common meme, so I think it makes sense people modify it to illustrate the moral dilemmas they are encountering in the world. It may feel like the trolley problem is not the right thought experiment for some situations because it was not meant to be universal, as I said. Thought experiments are just tools, efforts to make apparent, in this case, the difficulties of moral decisions and the conflicting priorities in given cases (among other problems). Thought experiments should be adapted and created to serve this purpose, to help us illustrate these problems. To do it the other way around which would be categorizing in which thought experiment (and its alternatives) a given problem clicks is to risk a rigid or incomplete framing of a problem in favor of an unnecessary categorization/boxing.
So, the dilemma U.S. voters are facing regarding the support of the Palestinian cause their two main political parties show is not necessarily going to fit any thought experiment in record. We either create a new one, abstain from using one, or heavily modify a known one. It’s natural some people decided this. Descriptive? I’d imagine a new thought experiment would be more useful capturing the nuances of the problem while also simplifying the hypotheticals. Effective for communication? Well, that’s the strength of this: a well known meme has better chances at being shared* (and virilized) than a whole new thing of a more serious nature.
Edit: *and here I include shared, commented, discussed, etc.
Oh man. The trolley problem is a thought experiment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking it and changing it into another thought experiment that’s loosely based on the original. Who’s going to stop you? The thought police?
Also don’t forget we’re in a memes channel. You’re taking this way too seriously.
Just making a point. It’s not much of an experiment if you can make it whatever you want. At that point… it’s easily solvable.
“Just teleport the trolly into another dimension.”
Done. Solved. No dilemma.
The response to the dilemma doesn’t get to create the constraints though? Only the dilemma itself gets to set the rules.
I understand you’re making a point, but it’s not a good one. Yes, you can create a thought experiment where the trolley can be teleported into another dimension. Is that a worthwhile thought experiment? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that creating variations of established thought experiments is inherently invalid.
It’s no more worthwhile than this meme
The trolley problem is limited to the ethics of sacrificing one person to save the lives of many. Anyone using the Trolley problem to describe complex scenarios like this is just having a bit of fun.
It’s limited by the restrictions that govern the choices. The problem with these memes is that more often than not- their purpose is not in good faith to begin with.
mostly i just made the post as a reaction to others making similar posts with far less nuance
at this point it’s no longer about the original trolley problem but about using popularly readable memetic symbols to convey a simplified model of reality efficiently
so maybe i’d encourage you to take a step back and reevaluate with this in mind :) it’s possible this post isn’t for you and that’s fair too
The trolley has breaks the conductor can push at any time, though even if they’re pushed their efficiency depends on side levers next to every lever, and some levers are worth much more than others.
trying to figure this out, is this about local government?
And the House and Senate. The levers that are worth more are the electoral college like you pointed out and fucked up districts
Is your assumption that third parties solve all our problems if they win?
The problem is the system, not the Individual actors involved. Yes there are some differences, but not enough to fix our current disasters.
The problem is the system
And how do we change the system
Political organizing and pressure campaigns. I don’t personally see any of the prominent parties, including third parties, as good vehicles for this, and it will take far more than voting. So I would like to see a movement built outside of the political system that demands systemic change towards more and better democracy.
For the sake of the model and steel-manning my would-be opponents I make that assumption, yes.
But you are correct, I heartily recognize this assumption is quite silly in reality.
This. If we’re bringing math into this, then it’s mathematically impossible for not voting / 3rd party to change anything in the same way calculus may not be 0 but near-zero enough to be indistinguishable. Combine FPTP with Electoral colleges with the power of existing political parties and the only way you’re going to make change is by either one or both of the following things:
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Supporting one party so greatly you eradicate the other party, creating a vaccuum (eg, send GOP the way of the Whigs).
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Utilize an existing party to change the system. This means evolving the party, which for anyone old enough, recognizes how much Democrats have changed in the last 2 decades relative to the Republicans who have actually somehow managed to only get worse.
These are the only two proven methods to work. Third parties, Independents do not work until the system changes. And in order to change the game you need to first play by the rules of the game.
These are the only two proven methods to work. Third parties, Independents do not work until the system changes
the prohibition party got a constitutional amendment passed.
…and kept it that way for less time than Supernatural was on air. not disagreeing just feel that’s important context :)
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The world would literally be a paradise by next tuesday if Vermin Supreme was president
So is next election cycle the one to support a third party? Or the following? Will there ever be a time when it’s OK to support one or lesser of two evils for the rest of our lives?
ranked choice voting asap ✨
And are the Republicans or democrats waving a magical wand to make that happen over night? What about the states that have outlawed it?
Hoping that it is given to us, and doing nothing to build the political powerbase to make it happen doesn’t help. These changes we want to see need us to build and maintain coalitions, not just wait for other people to do the work for us or approach it like one person can fix the issue. If there are changes you want to see in the world, start working with you friends and family to get the word out about the issue and start doing things in your shared spaces to get that to happen.
BRUH the children are ALREADY dying!
bruh i agree you are correct no need to shout
