• jama211@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Well, you’ve wandered straight into the problem that is unavoidable if you study trolley problems for long enough. Context matters HUGELY and is an infinite fractal. Take for example your airplane/parachute situation - there is no single answer and therefore it’s unanswerable because it’s so dependent on the situation, the people involved, where are you, how much time do you have, how heavy are the two of you, do you have time to tie yourselves together and attempt to both use the parachute, etc etc etc. But the worst bit is so many people will then try and make a trolley problem equivalent, which you also can’t do without changing the context further.

    I don’t think there’s anything wrong with academic conversations about trolley problems, but low quality, unanswerable variants posted in meme subreddits might not be the best place.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        The post was fine. People who get angry at the concept of a thought experiment are just admitting that they’re uncomfortable with thinking.

        It’s be one thing if it was some thinly vieled “gotcha”, but it isn’t.

      • lemmyman@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        I don’t know man I think it was a good post. If you didn’t like how this convo went you could always just fall back to “sir this is a wendys” in the future