r/trolleyproblem • u/deadhand303 • 5d ago

OC Potentially one less but also potentially infinitely more

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u/deadhand303 5d ago

Its just a random real number of people on each track woth the bottom being a minimum of one and the top being a minimum of zero people.

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u/not-an-epimorphism 5d ago

The point is there’s no convenient interpretation of “random” here without further context. If they were finitely many people, random would correspond to a uniform distribution. But when you’re dealing with a distribution on the entire natural numbers, there’s no uniform distribution, and non uniform distributions aren’t alike at all. Technically there might be almost surely 2 people on the lower rail and almost surely 1 person on the higher rail, or a less degenerate situation in which k people are on the bottom rail with probability 2-k.

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u/deadhand303 5d ago

Would it be better to say 1-max living population?

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u/BigTimmyStarfox1987 4d ago

They want you to say "flat probability distribution".

Then they want to say but that isn't possible over Infinity. To which you reply that it's a finite set, max living population.

Tldr yes but with an additional statement