Chris Acton
Michael W Lucas 
This. All of this. Times several million.
https://medium.com/@GregPogorzelski/the-thing-about-the-kobayashi-maru-4d5e1e49993e
also:
I wonder how much of ST:TOS can be explained by Kirk looking at a situation and thinking "Not this time you bastard. Not again."
@mwl I've always thought his motivations were to sleep with the female aliens... Like those green-skinned Orion snake-women.
@agreeable_landfall that's pike, not kirk
Michael Dexter@mwl That works with cats too.
LJ@mwl wow. That was an incredible read.
Simon Zerafa"The Kobayashi Maru isn’t a simulation. It’s propaganda in video game form, and it’s conveying a way of doing things that shouldn’t be part of Starfleet, whether it was intended to by its designers or not."
Absolutely.
Do not accept an invalid test or the status quo because a higher authority says you must 🙂🖖
HishamThis is exactly how I feel about the Trolley Problem.
It is a completely unrealistic propaganda device for a kind of utilitarian philosophy. One with terrible consequences we see all around us today.
The fact that it comes from and is especially popular in the English-speaking world (and has slowly spread to the rest of the world via memes in the recent years) also denounces its lack of universality. It is not a fundamental moral dilemma. It is exactly what this story describes.
Zimmie@hisham_hm @mwl People really take the wrong thing away from the trolley problem. It isn’t directly about what you personally would or should do. Instead, it’s like an axis of comparison for ethical frameworks. It’s one of the extremes where differences (and sometimes similarities) between them become more apparent.
Like how Schrödinger’s cat isn’t saying the cat is both alive and dead, it’s taking a model we have for quantum effects and showing how, when taken to extremes, it produces results which are patently absurd.
and just like that damn cat, we obsess about the worst case and not the model it's supposed to be used to measure.
See also: "separate art from the artist."
@bob_zim @mwl I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but my main contention with such thought exercises is precisely that ethical frameworks cannot be neatly isolated into axes (I have a similar gripe with the Political Compass, which I see as Libertarian propaganda; the fact that it is used in Libertarian recruitment corroborates my view).
Continental philosophy has its flaws (it often gets lost in language) but, at its worst, analytic philosophy can be dehumanizing.
@hisham_hm @mwl Ethical frameworks can absolutely be classified along axes. That’s a big chunk of what the field of comparative ethics is about.
The point of the trolley problem is that when taken to extremes, some ethical frameworks say action is unethical, other frameworks say inaction is unethical, and most real people fall somewhere between. Which stance people agree with and to what extent varies by region, upbringing, and much more. It’s a tool for sociological research into value theory like the Heinz dilemma, the Ring of Gyges, and so on.
Stryder Notavi@bob_zim @hisham_hm @mwl Honesty, the only real ethical question I can see at the heart of the trolley problem is "Is inaction as morally culpable as action".
Because the choice is simply:
* Do nothing and five people die.
* Do something and directly cause the death of one person.
If your inaction makes you just as responsible for the death of the five, then clearly the moral choice is to throw the switch.
But if not acting means I'm not responsible, then I'm only a murderer if I throw the switch.
@StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl And my point is that nowhere in real life this question would come up so devoid of further context.
For example, if a self-driving car reaches a point where it needs to choose between continuing straight and hitting five people or steering to the side and hitting one, that is not "an instance of the trolley problem": the true question at hand involves every ethical decision that led to that scenario becoming a possibility in the first place.
SamuelJohnson@hisham_hm @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl Nowhere in real life?
Was the worst of Covid so long ago that you have forgotten the people who asserted their "right" not to wear a masked trumped the "right" of others, incl especially vulnerable others, not to be infected?
Here, currently, there are routine adverts encouraging people who feel ill (w flu etc) to stay home to avoid spreading infections.
Not exactly throwing a switch but decisions w moral & potential life & death consequences.
@samueljohnson @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl Of course, moral decisions involving life and death exist. Again, and that's my whole point, they are not devoid of context. The trolley problem is not a useful device for thinking about them.
If we want to effectively deal with the question of the harm made by people who don't wear masks in a pandemic, abstracting the situation into a "choice between a lesser harm by action or a greater harm by inaction" is absolutely not the way to do it.
@hisham_hm @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl I think the trolley metaphor is easily understood and fairly widely applicable.
Retrench employment vs close a plant entirely eg
In this case no explicit death sentence, but Boris Johnson's govt was, at one point during Covid pandemic, happy to consider, pretty explicitly (in private), sacrifice of pensioners to "keep the economy open".
Objecting to *false* choices is fine but sometimes choices do have to be made.
See Churchill on Enigma code work eg.
@samueljohnson @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl Choices do have to be made, but in every real world context there is more nuance than a binary choice.
Applying the trolley problem mindset to any of those scenarios you described is problematic because: (A) none of these choices are purely binary, there are more alternatives and nuance; (B) the different choices are not harms of the same nature that differ only in quantity.
It is a cop-out to justify a harmful decision through false dichotomy.
@samueljohnson @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl ...and of course (C) the trolley problem mindset brushes away the series of decisions that led to the scenario where one has to choose between two bad outcomes in the first place. Politicians in particular love this feature.
In short, saying "look, it's the lesser evil! Kind of like in the trolley problem!" is effectively a thought-terminating cliché.
@hisham_hm @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl "Politicians in particular love this feature". Famously,
"To govern is to choose"
Pretending otherwise, or that all will be content, is simple-minded.
People who govern make choices. It's what they are appointed to do.
Enough (binary choice exercised here).
Charles de Gaulle: 'To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.' — The Socratic Method
To govern is always to choose among disadvantages. To govern is always to choose among disadvantages. These words by the renowned French statesman Charles de Gaulle hold great significance in the realm of governance and decision-making. At its core, this quote suggests that leaders are often face
@hisham_hm @StryderNotavi @bob_zim @mwl Any assertion that genuinely binary choices don't exist in the "real world" is false.
When Churchill decided that Coventry couldn't be evacuated eg, lest the Germans learn their communications were compromised (to cite only one of many such decisions).
Metaphorically, the people of Coventry on one rail, the outcome of the war on the other. The legitimacy of the decision and of the principle aren't a subject of dispute.
@samueljohnson I never said binary choices don't exist. I said they are never devoid of backstory and context, and that such context makes it so the options are never merely quantitative in difference. You skipped my key point.
Alluding to the TP metaphor in real world scenarios is only useful if one wants to erase the backstory and context, and if wants to reduce the story of different harms to a merely quantitative comparison ("war > city!").
@samueljohnson By the way, there _is_ nuance to your Churchill example (the true outcome of the war is not known in advance; and people did flee in advance, etc). Most importantly, the Coventry dillemma story itself is debunked by historians and those involved.
It's a good anecdote, but reality is always more complicated, which was my whole point.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz#Coventry_and_Ultra
* https://theweek.com/articles/469742/history-detective-did-churchill-sacrifice-city-protect-secret
But enough indeed! Cheers!
Amro has been@hisham_hm @mwl
"Now, before we think about the trolley problem. Let's get these people of the rails!"
"Now, before we think about the trolley problem. Let's get these people of the rails!"
Darwin Woodka
Bill Hooker@hisham_hm 100% agree.
Adrian Cockcroft@hisham_hm @mwl The other solution to the trolley problem is to ask someone who works in a railway marshaling yard rather than a philosopher. They already know the answer, switch the points while the train is passing over them and derail it to stop it.
Michel PatriceYou are spoiling philosophers’s fun.
Mopsi
Scarab (Sarah)@adrianco @hisham_hm @mwl The drawings usually show the trolley empty, but if it has passengers, derailing it is another choice that might kill even more people. But I like the idea of trying to come up with another way.
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘
JP@hisham_hm @mwl exactly. it's a framing exercise about de-centering everyone in the paths of the trolley and centering + identifying with the decision maker holding the lever. no surprise that it's come up a lot recently, with the powerful refusing to accept accountability for their failures and writing off millions of lives.
Violet MadderAnd the assholes tying people to the tracks in the first place, get away with it.
@hisham_hm @mwl "The only real solution to the trolley problem is to find and kill the prick who keeps tying people to trolley tracks and making people choose which ones die"
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/oh-no-now-the-us-will-have-a-president
Cassandrich@hisham_hm @mwl The trolley problem used as an analogy almost always falsely implies agency for sending the smaller group to their deaths when that's not actually the choice to be made. Move the smaller group before the junction and it's much likelier to reflect reality, where the choice is purely to save some people or not, where there are others you have no power to save.
Beady Belle Fanchannel@hisham_hm @mwl the memes are there because people know it's a silly dilemma, and poke fun at it
@Profpatsch @mwl unfortunately, I'm afraid you overestimate the general audience outside of our bubble. A quick trip to the topic's Wikipedia page will show you how seriously people take it.
Also, never underestimate the power of memes. The rise in popularity of the likes of Bolsonaro had a lot to do with that. Turning anyone into a household name, or bringing any idea into the general discourse, no matter how, is very powerful.
@mwl It's odd to read this as I use the KM as an analogy for many, many scenarios in our world, mostly connected to enshittification.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦@mwl that hit me hard. WOW.
Ramin Honary@blogdiva @mwl how did this little scene about the Kobayashi Maru escape my memory? I guess I wasn’t all that invested in The Original Series and the details from that series just didn’t stick with me like the details from later iterations of Star Trek. But yeah, when you re-examine some of the doctrine it is pretty profound… sometimes.
Roddenberry was kind of the opposite of Kubrick. He was astoundingly optimistic about human nature.
I remember back in 2016 after the first time Trump was elected, to give help give people hope, The Oatmeal did a comic about how Roddenberry survived an airplane crash while he was deadheading in a Lockheed Constellation over a desert in Syria, and how he helped try to calm and comfort the passengers right up until they hit the ground. That’s the kind of guy he was, and it shows through in the science fiction he wrote.
(EDIT: it was indeed Syria, it was a Lockheed Constellation and not a DC-8, and he was the deadhead and not the copilot.)
Puncha Not See 🏳️⚧️Wow, Ramin. You just sent me on a Pan Am Flight 121 rabbithole and it was fascinating! Thank you. :) 🌸
thomas yager-madden
CleoMatra@mwl
"But there’s enough people out there thinking you don’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Here’s the thing with people like Kodos: they never break their own eggs. They always break everybody else’s. It’s all just excuses.” 🎯
"But there’s enough people out there thinking you don’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Here’s the thing with people like Kodos: they never break their own eggs. They always break everybody else’s. It’s all just excuses.” 🎯
MostlyTato@mwl
I enjoyed reading that. Well written and utterly plausible.
I enjoyed reading that. Well written and utterly plausible.
@mwl Excellent read! And, I had completely forgotten about that part of Kirk's past.
NosirrahSec 🏴☠️ guillotine enthusiast@mwl It almost felt like I was reading my own inner monologue.
Tindra@mwl I was never a commanding officer (yay enlisted!) but heard enough deployment speeches to realize that some COs thought their job was to being all their people home, while others realized that their job was to *conduct warfare* and you don’t always get to being all your people back from that.
Richard Hendricks@TindrasGrove Hence Starbuck berating Apollo telling him not to say "Be careful out there", but instead "Good hunting". #BSG
John LuskWell... that was one of the better Star Trek riffs I've seen.
Mister Moo 🐮@mwl Huh, I never had it in my head that there's no penalty for not attempting to rescue the ship. I assumed that all your actions in the sim are up for judgment, and that's one of the big ones. Is it canon that trainees are perfectly free to hang back and let the Maru blow up? And by canon I mean pre-Abrams, non-Kelvinverse canon.
@MisterMoo yep, that's canon
ezmyrelda@mwl I feel like I’m supposed to apply this to real world scenarios. Gonna think on it for a good long time.
F. Douglas Wall@mwl It's interesting, certainly. But it presupposes that the characters know everything that we do: That the Kobayashi Maru simulation is rigged as a no-win scenario. If everyone knew that it's a psychological test rather than a tactical simulation, it becomes useless as a psychological test.
Kirk knew that it was a no-win scenario because he had to take apart the simulation to understand it in order to cheat. He might have been looking for the "perfect strategy" buried in the code, but
1/
@mwl was ultimately forced to cheat because the perfect strategy didn't exist.
aburka 🫣@mwl > Tell me bones, how many times have we faced a real no-win situation? A certain death in face of helping people? I write the logs, Bones. The answer is never.
Survivorship bias! This conversation isn't happening on the bridges of starships that were destroyed in real no-win situations!
neutron_chick@aburka @mwl I did think about that at the beginning! I like the sentiment of this conclusion, but it might be starting from an incomplete dataset because survivorship bias is the mother of all biases...Or in the trolley analogy: Yes, what sick pricks would tie people to the tracks? But in real life, there are sick pricks who will do that...So I think an answer could be: take the best decision at the time, inflict the less pain possible, then go and find the pricks who are tying people to tracks
demofox@mwl this is great.
tapeloop@mwl Counterpoint: The Kobayashi Maru is just about informed consent
Gavin Jones 
@mwl that is a thing of true beauty.