2³² will get interesting...

Honestly I would. Like I wouldn't hesitate to kill patient zero of a world ending disease.

But then it isn't a world ending desease, you just killed somebody
- The use of a time machine is implied in these situations
- If you killed patient 0, then it wasn't a world ending disease either.
Maybe a world ending disease is the cure... just looking around.
- Cure for what? That's a fascist argument. I am not accusing you. Just wanted to inform. I was intellectualizing like that once: if all humans die, life on the planet would thrive, species that go extinct wouldn't be an issue we would only be seeing it as a product of the evolution of more biodiversity for sure...
  Yet... A friend pointed out, that such disease is just a theorization and reality has shown that this kind of scenarios are lived in, for example, catastrophes. In those cases, the world ending event hits harder to the most vulnerable. Typically, the poorest fraction. Billionaire and other rich people will have resources, bunkers, time, and so on... They may even be saved.
  And this is actually their agenda in, for example, climate change denialism and inaction.
  That's one reason why elites don't care about the ecocide.

2³² is roughly four billion. We'll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.

This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.

Just a little more and every single particle in the universe will be on the tracks, and what the fuck would happen if every particle in the universe was split in twain? Let's assume it radiated outward from the center of the universe at the speed of light...
- so umm if it was every particle, what would be hitting it? ~~Don't say my mom.~~
- Paging Mr. Munroe...
- My god, we've figured it out.

Do you know any of the people involved?

at the 33rd round you do
If you are number 32 the chance is 50/50
- How do you know blahblahblah only knows one person? Are you that one person?
- Just keep doubling until max_int and segfault reality

As long as everyone doubles there will be no deaths.

Why do I get the feeling this kind of logic is used by modern day economists to justify inflation?
But I don't know if I trust literally infinite people. It might be better to kill one. Because unless you believe all humans are 100% willing to never kill someone then you're risking a number of deaths larger than 1. (Potentially much larger.)
- No need to trust infinite people. You just need to get past 33 forks before you run out of people to operate the switch or to be tied to the tracks.
When we are all strapped to the tracks, who will decide?

Sounds like what we have been doing with the environment.

How fast is the train going can I make it to the person who's tied down and lay with them

You didn't kill that person, the person who invented the problem did.

Philosophy is easy.

Maybe there is nobody tied up after the third split, nobody explicitly stated it continues!

if the choice is always the same and it goes forever, then always choosing to pass means no one gets killed? unless you get to a little shit who breaks the trend

Yes. But it keeps going forever, and eventually some chaotic-evil person will kill choose to kill 2^43 people, which is a thousand times the world's population.

You'll eventually have to include alien life. What a great way to see if aliens exist!

This is also Thanos wet dream come true. Keep racking up the "pass"!

After person 33 there won't be any more humans to tie to the rails

Edit: which was pointed more subtly by OP in the title

So if you the 32, you choice is to kill hall of the humanity, or be killed by the next person Why does it feel like this is his is the choice we all have ?
- no, this means you already saved half. unless someone was untying the people from previous track then re-tie them again to be killed?

Everyone just doubles it and we're good

That's kind of how it feels like living in the modern age to be honest. We're just doubling it until somebody decides to pull the lever.
- What could possibly go wrong?
  Daddy needs a new pair of multi-billion dollar AI startup Equity!

I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn't go on infinitely. Hear me out:

When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is 0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let's consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^{33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they'd have to pull the lever with likelihood `x` so that `x * 2}33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1 which would lead to x = 1/2^{33` or about `x≈0.0000000001`. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I'd guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above `1/2}33`, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is 'only' one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.

I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(

I am not seeing it. Are you saying the last person chooses between killing nobody and killing the entire population? Also, what about the intermediary likelihoods of pulling the lever?
- That was my assumption, yes. Because the last person would have the entire population on the tracks, and you can't really continue after that.
  I neglected the intermediary likelihoods, because that calculation was too long for wolfram alpha, but I have since managed to get it working, and the conclusion is not significantly different. The expected number of deaths skyrockets, even if the chance of pulling the lever is tiny for every person.
- They choose between half the whole population and the whole population (very roughly as it aligns alongside exponents of 2)
Reading this analysis, I think it's all but guaranteed that the person at the switch on the last step is Davros.
Wait, we were supposed to figure out how to get less ppl ran over?

I'd get it done and over with. I would resent myself forever, and accept any punishment for it, but it's better than waiting to see if someone wants to decide to kill off half the world later on. Would be even easier if I could take the first persons spot on the tracks so there only has to be one messed up person rather than two.

In recognition of your heroic sacrifice, I volunteer to pull the switch to send the train to run over you.

What happens if you are both to be killed and must flip the switch?

Is this some kind of IPv6 joke that's gone over my head?

"double it and give it to the next person" was sort of a trend with street interview type content. Like "Do you want a cookie or double it and give it to the next person." Then the second would be "Do you want two cookies or double it and give it to the next person?" Eventually someone takes the cookies. It wasn't cookies necessarily, sometimes money, sometimes other trinkets, whatever.

I would, because the second track potentially scales to infinity, and pulling the lever is the only sure way to minimize the death and suffering.

Also, if everyone avoids pulling the lever, you technically have an infinite amount of people who will die and an infinite amount of guilty consciences, also an infinite amount of people blaming the last guy for forcing the decision on them, like the most messed up version of the infinity hotel.

Also, the infinity of people who die is also significantly larger and less quantifiable than the number of leaver guys.

But once you get to round 33 34, everyone on earth is tied to the track, so there's no one to pull the lever. That means that the trolley safely passes by, giving everyone ample time to free themselves. Eventually, the trolley stops due to friction with the track and air, plus brakes if it's using them, and then we all stop getting tied to tracks.
- Also, I actually have my doubts that the trolley could get through 8 000 000 000 people before stopping due to the resistance, so at least some people should be fine.
The trolley will probably stop before you reach infinity luckily

The trolley problem thought experiment does a whole lot of work to define personal responsibility. IRL it's difficult to be the guy who does the evil thing for a good outcome, and easy to kick the can to the next guy, even while making it worse.

The optimal solution to the trolley problem is always the one that makes the least sense because the more chaos injected into any system the less predictable the results will be.

So I pull it, kill the other person at the second lever, and drag throw the person from the first set of tracks to the place where the train switches tracks. wrench the lever free from the top part and place it on the tracks where the train would switch too.

Fucked if I know what the outcome is.

You try to save them all by tackling the guy on the second track. The train is 400m from the wye in the track but 375m from the point the second person can decide to flip the switch. You are 270m from the second person. The train travels at a steady 15m/s. You start running at an acceleration of 0.5m/s/s. Can you tackle the second person to prevent them from flipping the switch? Assume flipping the switch means killing the poor tied up folks.

I dunno. I just made up numbers though.

I assume if they DON'T flip it, it gets passed yo the next guy with 4 people tied to the track.
33junctions down the road, and it's the population of the earth tied down.
- Yes but that is literally the opposite of the premise I presented. That's how it's normally seen, but this is just fun and dumb high school physics question. K thx bai
You try to save them all by tackling the guy on the second track
Or ask the train driver to stop

at some point you run of people to man the switch and prevent the trolley from hitting the people?

I would set it up in a way that all the people is tied in the main track, so if there's no one to flip the switch we all die.

I woukd kill the poor guy without hesitation. I am not letting that shit get out of hand.

How far down the line before you wouldn't be able to pull the trigger? Everyone here assumes we're at the start of the line, rather than just getting picked up midway through. Not sure where I'd be able to call that myself though....
- If we get to where everyone is tied up, no one can pull the lever

Do i get to choose the person i kill?

And how I kill them?
- easy there killer

I wouldn’t. The likeliness of the next person choosing to kill even more people decreases fast with each iteration. And, I believe we can find 30 people who aren’t willing to become mass murderers pretty easily, even if they are selected randomly

With everybody tied up before the 34th track, who exactly is there to push the lever?

Winnie the Pooh.
Alice.
Thanos.
The Dude.
Waldo.
Marry Poppins.
Rudolph the red nose reindeer.
Margaret Thatcher.
Douglas Adams.
Petunia pot (all dead!)
- Agrajag would never
More to the point, if everyone is tied up at that point, who tied them up?

Easy, kill the first person.

Endless regress here we go

Easy choice. Everyone could just leave right now and nobody would die. If someone actively decides to kill people, that's not on anyone who chose not to themselves.

A interesting twist would be that you're held accountable for the death(s) when you pull the lever. Would you risk life in prison to stop the death toll from doubling?

It would sit well with my conscience that I likely prevented a worse fate for exponentially more people, and prevented another person from having to make a worse choice. Which they themselves would likely only make twice as worse, and so on. I could live with that.
What I'm not sure of is how I would handle being a deicision-maker N steps down the line. Being the first guy, sure. The 16th? I dunno.

The real ethical question here is, is there only one round of trolleys?

Because if this is a one and done question, then obviously I go for the one person.

But if it's possible at any point somebody comes along and has to run the experiment again after me, then if I leave an infinitely expanding number on one side, all it would take is one sadistic person to wipe out a incalculable amount of life.

In which case, I take the track with two people. And again, it is a question of repetition whether or not doing it once means that it won't happen next time or if this will continue with every cycle.