/lit/ - Literature

>>20239609
We’re not posting trolley problem edits here for you to then save them all and post them on your “basedevropazoomer” profile with 50 followers tops. Go Google some if you’re so keen on getting them

>>20228165
You're not arguing anything clearly here.
>if I control the possible choices, I can control outcomes
Sure, but they're still choosing. And again, you have this habit of straying far from the beaten path. This subpoint was initially about the ability to discern appearances from reality. And if you don't think you have the ability to do that, not even as a skill that could be trained over time, then we will have to agree to disagree.

>And you can't speak about a patient, suffering from perceiving demonic clowns, if you yourself aren't hallucinating demonic clowns.
How is that remotely a comparable analogy? If you don't believe in objective value judgments, then you can't ascribe an objective value judgment in good faith. This has nothing to do with empathy, lived experience, or whatever you were trying to say.

>What would you learn from a Trolley Problem? That killing one man is better than five via indirectly pressing a button?
An abstract thought experiment is not experience. It's strange that you even thought it was.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error
I like how you brought up Damasio, considering how much I love his work. He's fully on board with the notion that we're not "disembodied reason machines." And if you read the Stoics like Chrysippus, you'll realize that emotions are a form of "inertial" logic, complete with axioms, probability assumptions, etc., of their own. You can train them in the long-term.

>>20228130
>Do you think people aren't capable of thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_architecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
They aren't.

>You can't call me abominable if you don't believe that good and bad things exist.
And you can't speak about a patient, suffering from perceiving demonic clowns, if you yourself aren't hallucinating demonic clowns.

>Then I learn from them. Experience helps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
What would you learn from a Trolley Problem? That killing one man is better than five via indirectly pressing a button?

>Now you're just thinking sloppily
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal
Your judgement is based on emotions. Emotions are heuristics.
Showing visual sense-perception heuristics is just more vivid and, thus, easier to show.

For what it's worth, I liked Sequeira's 2019 debut, "Nightlife." It was a little bare-bones compared to its successor, but it did have a lot of interesting themes to go off. Joe's night shift at the gas station, for instance, is an angle I don't see explored much in books these days, and it offers a pretty cool window into that kind of lifestyle. It's a nice breezy read and I would recommend it for anyone who's looking to get into postmodern fiction. The bit with the cab driver is also great. Oh, and the scene with the trolley problem. I always like Nic when he dumps on these pseudointellectual phrases like a complete and total BAWSE

>>19758239
>So? You didn't choose who you were born to.
And who you COULD have been born to has no relevance to your decision. I COULD have been born to Jian Xian in Guandong Province but it doesn't mean that I have some very very small obligation to fly across the planet and take care of him in his old age. I have zero obligation. I was NOT BORN TO HIM. His ethnicity, heritage, and needs have NO INCLUSION in any concept of filial obligation that I have.
Because, again, morality is deterministic and not probabilistic.

Here's an example, a classic trolley problem.
There's a trolley coming down a rail. On its current lane, there's a man stuck on the rails and I'm too far away to reach him. But there's a lever next to me that switches the trolley to another rail where no one is present. The lever doesn't work too well, and there's a 50% chance that when I pull it that nothing happens and it gets stuck.
Does this mean that, compared to pulling a hypothetical lever that works correctly, it's 50% as good to pull this lever that doesn't always work correctly?

>>19629873
Gedanken Fictions - Thomas A. Easton, editor (2000)

Gedanken is German for "thought experiment". This was used as a textbook for a college class that the editor taught about SF. So go whims of what to read and how much is written. I've previously read some of these stories and read them again.

The Cold Equations - Tom Godwin (1954)
This is one of the most famous SF short stories. I often see it mentioned and discussed by authors and editors. I've read several variations by authors who wanted to present their own version. For Godwin, this was his one-hit wonder. It was controversial for its content and plausibility at the time and remains so. Some believe it to be quite the tearjerker. The plot is the trolley problem. The story is very contrived, but that's not entirely the fault of the author, as the editor, Joseph A. Campbell, refused to accept the story unless it ended in the way he preferred. Campbell was both one of the most influential and controversial figures of early SF. The Campbell Award for Best New Writer was renamed the The Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2019.
Meh (same for all variations)

Skystalk - Charles Sheffield (1979)
1979 was was the year that space elevators were popularized by novels from Arthur C. Clarke and Sheffield. In this they are called a "beanstalk". Several other works later used this name as well. There's a bomb on the space elevator that must be disarmed. That's similar to the beginning of Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds.
Meh

Dear Colleagues - Tom Ligon (1994)
A satire about how ethical, moral, regulatory, theoretical, and other concerns only get in the way of doing real and practical hands-on science. Risks must be taken. People will die. That's science.
Blah

The Winnowing - Isaac Asimov (1976)
A neo-Malthusian story about lifeboat ethics due to being unable to support the world population in 2005 of 6 billion, which would've been 7 billion if a billion people hadn't starved to death over the past generation. The solution is to commit the greatest atrocity in history. Overpopulation was a popular SF theme in the 20th century. The world population in 2005 was 6.5 billion. Currently several million die of hunger each year. Many countries are in population decline due to sub-replacement fertility.
Blah

Outport - Garfield Reeves-Stevens (1992)
The future is a dysgenic wasteland. Any Mexican who goes north is killed by the US military. The protagonist leads a group of Americans who want Mexican children.
Blah

The Greenhouse Papers - Jeff Hecht (1991)
"The greenhouse effect is just the latest leftist cult" This story baffled me with its "science". I looked the author up. He has a twitter account. It's exactly how I expected.
Blah

Runaround - Isaac Asimov (1942)
The story that introduced The Three Laws of Robotics.
Blah

La Macchina - Chris Beckett (1991)
Robots aren't people, praise Jesus, they're better.
Blah

>>19507217
How serendipitous. I just snagged pic related from a Trolley Problem thread on /pol/ not too long ago.

>>19479275
A trolley problem assumes a dualistic world fundamentally and that all actions are taken in two. In a moral sense this challenges moral agency through ontological implications. Even worse it has no solution. Schrodinger's cat was negatively explanatory. The trolley problem is just the worst parts of modern analytic philosophy mixed w the problem of consciousness.

>>19479275
t. totally bamboozled and outstripped by the trolley problem

How would a Stoic handle the Trolley problem?

>>19422245
Musings Part 2/2

Excerpts & Responses
No plot spoilers.

>Reading was an unseemly trait in a man.
Men don't read. That's why women now dominate books in the real world.

>feminine arts: music, painting, writing, logic, and science.
Women are for culture. Men are for practicality.

>I haven’t the patience for a simperer.
NO SIMPS ALLOWED
Here's a review of a different Sanderson wrote that I had a lot of fun writing about that this reminded me about, especially the spoilered part: >>/lit/thread/S14689093#p14701812

>Nine out of ten Soulcasters were capable of a few limited transformations: creating water or grain from stone; forming bland, single-roomed rock buildings out of air or cloth.
Water and grain from stone? MANNA! Rock buildings out of air? Literally incredible.

>A greater one...could effectuate any transformation. Literally turn any substance into any other one.
Philosopher's stones!

>Ten Essences
It may just be a coincidence, but it reminds me of the "Sefirot meaning emanations, are the 10 attributes/emanations in Kabbalah" that's not uncommonly used in RPGs and some Japanese media.

>Hoid
Sanderson's reason for his existence is amusing.

>spanreed
Quantum entangled rubies? Aw yeah.

>...you are a self-righteous prude...But you come by it honestly.
Is this a self-description?

>Failure is preferable to winning through unjust means. Protecting ten innocents is not worth killing one. In the end, all men die.
Trolley problem solved.

>you might just have cracked one of the most perplexing—and ancient— mysteries
Rosetta stone moment was neat.

/sffg/ Consensus of 482 members
5: 59
4: 35
3: 7
2: 1
1: 0
Unrated: 10
Didn't Finish: 1
To Read: 51
Currently Reading: 3
Reviews: 9
Total: 167/482, 34.6% have shelved it in some way.
There aren't any blank accounts aside from the admin one, though several have very few books listed, so the actual percent may be higher.

Way of Kings has 102 ratings by members and Goodreads has 366,363 ratings.
Game of Thrones has ratings by ~150 members and Goodreads has 2,168,202 ratings.
Maybe I should look into similar more to see which books that the average member /sffg/ member is much more likely to read than the general sff audience.
Maybe it's not really much of a correlation at all.

>>19404968
The trolley problem is just a specific type of the general problem. The real problem goes something like this: suppose 5 people are about to be accidentally killed, but you have the power to change this so that only one person is killed. It is the difference between allowing 5 people to die and killing someone to save 5 people.

But to respond to your point, surely if these people are guilty, then they can be killed later. And it makes no sense for the saint to be tied up as well. And what if there are 5 saints against 1 saint? You can ask all sorts of questions like these. So you should not focus on the literal setting of the problem

I made a trolley problem, thoughts?

>>19171121
About the video, I don't think it makes much sense. Philosophy at university is normally considered to be a dialogue of sorts between the philosophers of the past and present, and will be continued by philosophers in the future. Usually a lot of contemporary philosophers build their theories and ideas off of past philosophers.
For example, the modern trolley problem (which is taught in a lot of first-year philosophy subjects) usually relies on the person understanding the principle of the doctrine of double effect - something which was introduced by Thomas Aquinas and is still used today.
Also, at least at my university, you don't only learn about old philosophers, but you also look at some contemporary ones.

i'm paralyzed and can't move. i can see my doom impending but the fear is not great enough to force me to act. i wiwll die a gentle, easily avoidable death (figuratively). its like the trolley problem but all you have to do is roll over off of the tracks. everything is at stake and it would be so easy to stay alive. but i wont do it, and worse yet i dont know why.

can someone make a trolley using the sleeping beauty problem please?

>>19125343
I think this problem would be harder if the trolley was originally heading down track 2 so inqction would kill the guy in the glass box.

>>19125343
how is this any different than the original trolley problem

>>19125343
>this is an actually studied and analysed problem in mathematics
BUT WHAT IF THERE'S A GIANT A.I. ROBOT TROLLEY AND IT CAN PREDICT THE FUTURE BUT ONLY IF YOU PULL THE LEVER BUT IT ALREADY KNOWS YOU WON'T PULL THE OPAQUE LEVER UNLESS THERE ARE 5 PEOPLE INSIDE THE BOX BUT NOT THE CLEAR BOX THE OPAQUE BOX WHICH THE A.I. PUT THERE ITSELF, BUT ONLY IF YOU GO BACK IN TIME AND PULL THE CLEAR LEVER TWICE THEN STICK IT IN YOUR ASS, IF NOT YOU END UP IN THE OPAQUE BOX WITH THE TROLLEY IN THE CLEAR BOX KILLING 6 MILLION PEOPLE, OF COURSE THE A.I. KNEW ABOUT ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU EVEN DECIDED TO THINK ABOUT PULLING THE LEVER
DO YOU PULL LE LEVER?

The solution to every trolley problem is always multitrack drifting.

The mod trolley problem: ban everyone on this board and delete all posts until another mod can be bothered to lift heir half ton mass just enough to undo the merciful grace of perman bans bestowed on all the boards pitiful creatures or continue administrating this board you stopped scrolling half a decade ago—you don’t get paid either way.

Aristotle. Read Nichomachean Ethics and then other ethical philosophy. People conceive of ethics as being the epic trolley problem but it’s really a field about how people ought to live their lives.

>>18937936
They are in a lot of trouble.

>>18936250
In Wang Huning's book, there's a funny part where he runs across a Trotskyist table on the street in New York (late 80s), because he notices a copy of the Communist Manifesto along with their literature (btw, it was the SWP). Of course everyone else on the street is ignoring it. And he starts talking to this Trot girl, who doesn't believe China is socialist, which disappoints him. Like, ah man, we just can't get a break. But they agreed that once China rose up to match the U.S., not even surpass it, and after a few more recessions rocked the capitalist world, then it'd be off to the races. I think about that a lot.

>>18936645
Thing is, fascists see a certain kind of mixed system (never well defined anyways) as the end state. But the reforms under Deng Xiaoping were always intended to be transitionary and temporary. That's one difference. Thing is, people here think 30-40 years is a long time. They have thousands of years of history over there and I think the culture thinks about historical time in a different way.

Mao even told Kissinger that he didn't even want Taiwan because there are too many reactionaries there so it'd be better to wait a century, so the U.S. could keep it, and then after enough time had passed, they could settle it between them. But they are going to settle it. I think the mentality is a little different. American politicians think about the next election, and capitalists think about the next quarter.

>>18940084
Well I dunno. I think Western socialists have a lot of confused ideas at the moment, but the American working class will be majority non-white pretty soon. This decade since the boomer population is about to fall of a cliff. White master race ideology will meet resistance. And on the other hand, I don't think the conditions of today are anything like Weimar Germany. People are much more atomized, so even an attempt to create some white-race socialism runs into the problem that there aren't enormous housing projects full of white working-class men who get to work on foot or trolley-car (like in 1920s Germany) in the U.S.

Or Proud Boys? Antifa? It's absolutely nothing like the 1920s. Political violence then was on a completely different scale and it was deadly and it was real. They were just coming out of World War I which absolutely shattered their whole fucking world. But communists in Western countries have similar problems organizing people. The best move communists could probably make is to all get jobs at Amazon.

>>18943217
>Marxism is a playbook for overthrowing an existing power structure and inserting yourself in its place.
Stop. You're gonna make it sound attractive...

>>18928731
The only correct answer to the trolley problem is that morals as such don't exist. Not sure why academics are still grappling with this when they're supposedly the top intellects of humanity. Even curry eaters from 2000 years ago were smarter when they developed the dharma.