Far & Near / Runaway Trolleys / The Proximity Of (Fat) Strangers

I think this illustrates a major limitation to the near/far concept: it's totally general and you just revised your beliefs about what constitutes near and what constitutes far because your judgement changed. In other words, it's impossible to say that near and far don't matter, because when you find a difference, you then decide that you're using different faculties. Without a reasonably clear framework of what constitutes near and what constitutes far, there's a huge tendency to use it to describe whatever you happen to feel like, and then arbitrarily revise it if your feelings change, i.e. "I thought shoving him was near, but, since it would have a greater effect on my behaviour, saying I would shove him when he's sitting in the room is actually near."

I thought most people chose not to push the fat man because there is no conceivably realistic way that a fat man could stop a train, even one as small as a trolley. Although the thought experiment tells us the fat man will stop the train, our knowledge of trains tells us that nothing stops trains. When I envision this scenario, I can't help but (realistically) imagine the trolly hitting the fat man, then continuing on and running over the five others.

See also: Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)

Okay, this is getting annoying. I've mostly ignored "near vs. far" topics because I don't know what the metaphorical meaning of the two is. Then, when I went to the LW wiki to be enlightened so I can understand these topics, what do I get?

NEAR: All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. FAR: Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits.

So ... one of them goes with a bunch terms that have some vague relationship to each other, and the other one ... um, does the same with different terms. Was that supposed to somehow be helpful?

Anyway, I don't know how to translate this into near and far, but here's my answer to the trolley problem:

Workers on the track consented to the risks associated with being on a trolley track, such as errant trolleys. (This does NOT mean they deserved to die, of course.) Someone standing above the track on a bridge only consented to the risks associated with being on a bridge above a trolley trolley track, NOT to the risk that someone would draft him for sacrificial lamb duty on a moment's notice.

By intervening to push someone onto the track, you suddenly and unpredictably shift around the causal structure associated with danger in the world, on top of saving a few lives. Now, people have to worry about more heros drafting sacrificial lambs "like that one guy did a few months ago" and have to go to greater lengths to get the same level of risk.

In other words, all the "prediction difficulty" costs associated with randomly changing the "rules of the game" apply. Just as it's costly to make people keep updating their knowledge of what's okay and what isn't, it's costly to make people update their knowledge of what's risky and what isn't (and to less efficient regimes, no less).

That is what differentiates pushing a fat guy off, from diverting one track to another. I don't pretend that that is what most people are thinking when they encounter the problem, but the "unusualness" of pushing someone off a bridge is certainly affecting their intuition, and so concerns about stability probably play a role. And of course, you have to factor in the fact that most people are responding on the fly, while the creator of the dilemma had all the time in the world to trip up people's intuitions.

This is not to say there aren't real moral dilemmas with the intended tradeoff. It's just that, like with the Prisoner's Dilemma, you need a more convoluted scenario to get the payoff matrix to work out as intended, at which point the situation is a lot less intuitive.

Obviously, replacing the lever with the fat man complicates the analysis beyond a simple payoff matrix.

There is not enough time to reliably convince yourself that your perceived consequences of pushing, and the associated payoff matrix, are accurate.

The train is too literally "near", and it is perfectly rational to default to your extremely useful, and emotionally forceful, "don't push people off bridges" heuristic.

Ethical dilemmas don't have to involve killing: firefighters are also trained to make rational (rather than emotive) life and death decisions: it may be better to leave resuscitating the baby who is seriously injured and concentrate instead on rescuing 2 adults still caught in the wreckage. Here training has an impact on the nature of the decision making process. Indeed, I recently heard the wife of a firefighter say that she had noticed his rational mode of decision making spill over into his personal life as his training became ingrained in his psyche.

Botogol, I enjoyed the piece immensely and found that it made me reconsider my own instinctive "of course you would push the fat man" response, having done the maths. If I truly, actually, honestly imagine myself in the exact situation, with a particular fat man in front of me (not a general fat man), then I am NOT so sure I could do it, bearing in mind, as you pointed out, that, like you, I wouldn't even have the moral courage to be rude to somebody in the ordinary course of events, even when it might serve a logical purpose. It's partly the jump from the generic to the specific but perhaps that is the same as the jump from Far to Near.

BTW, MatthewB, I think the point is that the man is fat because it takes someone OTHER than yourself to stop the train - self sacrifice is ruled out as an option so the soldier has to also decide between the fat man and the 5 railworkers.

Relevant links for those of us who haven't read everything yet:

• Near/Far thinking: LessWrong wiki, Overcoming Bias
• Trolley problem: The other wiki

Are these sorts of ethical dilemmas ever posed to people serving in the Military?

I often wonder about this, because there seems to be no shortage, in times of real crisis, to find a soldier willing to fling himself under the trolley (without needing to hurl a fat man) if need be.

Of course, this is something that is ingrained in the soldier's behavior during training, and it, at times, doesn't take.

Then, there are times when the military becomes filled with people who are willing to throw anyone onto that railroad track, as long as the math turns out correctly (more people saved than killed). It is an officer's job to do just that (and then order a soldier to do the actual throwing).

I guess this just shows that people are capable of having their normal morality either amplified or nullified depending upon the context. In some cases, there may be no morality to speak of in some classes of soldiers.

However, you do bring up an excellent point. Immediacy of the situation/decision. It is relatively easy for people to make dispassionate and rational decisions when they are not in the heat of the moment or more removed from the actual situation. I have found that it is a rare individual who can actually make a rational decision in the heat of the moment without considerable training (and not just mental training. It takes real simulation of the act for most people to learn just how they will react in such situations).

Was this intended to be published? It seems unedited. Save in "Drafts" instead of "Less Wrong" to unpublish.

My Conclusions It seems there is Far Near and Near Near, and if you ever again find yourself with time to meta-think that you are operating in Near mode.... then you're actually in Far mode. and so I will be more suspicious of the hypothetical thought experiments from now on.

When one watches the movie series called "Saw", they will experience the "near mode" of thinking much more than the examples given in this thread. "Saw" is about people trapped in various situations, enforced by mechanical means only (no psychotic person to beg for mercy, the same way you can't beg the train to stop), where they must choose which things to sacrifice to save a larger number of lives, sometimes including their own life. For example, the first "Saw" movie starts with 2 dieing people trapped in an abandoned basement, with their legs chained to the wall, and the only way the first person can escape is to cut off their foot with the saw. Many times in the movie series, the group of trapped people chose whose turn it was to go into the next dangerous area to get the key to the next room. Similarly, the psychotic person who puts the people in those situations thinks he is doing it for their own good because he chooses people who have little respect for their own life and through the process of escaping his horrible traps some of them have a better state of mind after escaping than before. I'm not saying that would really work, but that's the main subject of the movies and is shown in many ways simultaneously. These are good examples of how to avoid "meta thinking" and really think in "near mode": Watch the "Saw" movies.