He Pulled the Emergency Brake. Then He Learned He'd Misread the Whole Scene
Pulling the Lever in a Subway Problem
Eleven years ago, Jeff Kaufman pulled the emergency brake on Boston's Red Line, convinced a passenger's arm was caught in the door and would be severed. He later learned the man's bag—not his arm—was likely trapped, and that bystanders closer to the door saw it differently. The episode becomes a case study in how trolley-problem thought experiments fail in real life: we act under uncertainty, can't fully reason ahead, and the unilateralist's curse means one person's confident misreading can delay thousands.
This illustrates a major way philosophical problems can fail to translate to real life: we're always acting under uncertainty, without knowing the consequences of our options.
- pavel_lishin
> The worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently. On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour, perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people 1hr / 16 / 365 = 4.3y).*
I am not convinced by these kinds of calculations, and I think they generally do rationalists & their like a big disfavor.
A year of someone's life is approximately 9,000 hours.
If you spend an hour commuting to work and back for 30+ years, that's approximately the same amount of time.
But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.)
I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.
- flerchin
Excellent trolley problem. Living with your decisions is unavoidable. I would be able to live with "I stopped a train because I wasn't sure if someone was about to be maimed."
- kmoser
> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.
This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
- talkingtab
I don't think that this is a hard problem, if you look at it the right way: after the fact. It is the end state that is important.
Here are the end states:
Choice 1: You pulled the alarm when you believed there was reasonable cause. An ordinary person would believe the same.
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Outcome 1: It was only a bag, so you look foolish and maybe have people annoyed that you stopped the train for nothing.
Outcome 2: The person could have damaged their arm seriously. You did a good deed and look good and maybe people are annoyed that you stopped the train.
Choice 2: You do not pull the alarm when you believed there was reasonable cause, as above.
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Outcome 3: Only a bag so the person is annoyed that you did not and maybe other people.
Outcome 4: The person suffered severe injury. People are annoyed that you did not stop the train. You are clearly morally wrong and have lost part of your humanity.
Given that you reasonably thought the person's hand was in the door, the only ethical and moral action is to stop the train. It makes no difference what actually happened after the fact.
While the other possible outcomes may be unpleasant, the one where you stood by and let a person be hurt is the worst.
This is not an idle speculation. Once I was driving on an inter-state and a person who was seemingly drunk came zooming up, weaving in and out of traffic crossing lane lines. I could have called, highway patrol and did not.
My exit came up and after I took it I heard on the news that th […]
- empath75
I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.