ALSO trolley problem answers for spinder & anyone else who you think has a creative solution 👀

from this ask game

Spinder gets the point of this thought exercise but if they're going to ask such a contrived question, he's going to give a contrived answer. Which means he would learn a lot about trolleys and how easy it is to derail them (I am far from an expert but I think it would depend on the landscape. I suspect a trolley with a cable grip, like in San Francisco, is harder to derail if the cable grip is active, but idk). He's got a whole plan for derailing, or otherwise mechanically disrupting the trolley (if it stops pulling power does it stop moving? how fast can he get on the roof?). Aside from his absolute pettiness he also can't help but imagine the fallout from having vehicularly manslaughtered one or more people and he doesn't think he could deal with that.

Christina "now you're thinking with warpals" Larousse would just warp the trolley. Ideally this would happen after she already was not in the trolley, but if she has to die with it, so be it. In general, if sacrificing herself would save everyone else, she'd probably do it. But if there are other people in the trolley, as in some versions of the problem, because she's not going to sacrifice them to warp. Hypothetically she could just warp away the split in the track, thereby derailing the trolley and saving everyone. But that's a much smaller target than a trolley and harder to hit when she's moving. If she had to actually abide by the rules of the exercise she would kill the one person. Unless that one person was her father. Then she'd be so paralyzed about it that she'd do nothing and the five people would die. Which is still a lot less people than she indirectly enabled Althea to kill, but that's cold comfort.

Althea would let the five be killed without hesitation if there was a single person among them that had ever pissed her off. She doesn't really care either way, but it would feel better to get a little revenge. However, she would also switch away from a track Christina is tied to, an absolutely frigid comfort for Christina.

Vic, among others, has pointed out that if you do nothing, you're not responsible for what happens. Which is a tenuous position, but he would like it to be true. But he'd also rather kill one person than five, so make of that what you will.

Celia and Allison are still wondering what kind of Gotham-ass trolley line this is, like, first of all, how did these people get tied to the tracks? Is this some kind of a trick? Are the five people all robots and the one person a human? There's just not enough information here.

Dez would be extremely dismayed by the idea that the five people could be robots. But if they were, they have backups, right? Right? Syndy is already holding him back from steering away from the five probably-robots, because she considers herself an expert on how humans die, actually, so they can't run over the human. If the robots turn out to be humans, they are both scarred for life and also the first androids to go to jail, probably. They develop a weird game of chicken where they keep saying they're going to delete the memories but come up with reasons not to. Doing this only deals them more psychic damage.

"You just gotta kill the one person," Avis says, with total conviction and complete boredom. "That's how these puzzles work. You gotta do a shitty thing, so you have to do the least shitty version of the thing." It's a toss up if she'd automatically run over the five if she was considering whether or not to run over Sid as the one person, though.

@jezifster @kk7-rbs