One must imagine Maths grads happy

The answer is obvious. You need 2 trolleys to take both tracks.

I'd do top case since the number of people killed would converge to -1/12 meaning no suffering

I go for option 1.

In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that'd be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either...

• a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
• death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
• or - if it's an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that's just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.

Ah, but eventually the trolley breaks down, and in the case of the reincarnating circle, you end up with zero deaths (but a whole lot of Therapy)

Where I'm from Calc 2 is integrals. That wasn't so terrible. It was Calc 3 (vectors and series) that was the hard one.

Arguably these are different amounts of bad even before considering this: We generally consider existing preferable to non-existence to some extent when suffering isnt taken into account, consider that if you murder someone quickly and painlessly in their sleep without waking them, they dont really themselves suffer from it, but people will still find you to be a murderer, and would object to the idea that you might do it to them. In the top example, killing the people actually kills them, but in the lower example, it arguably doesnt, because the experiences of the people involved never actually cease, therefore, the lower path seems to me to be preferable because you supposedly get equivalent amounts of "suffering", but different amounts of time that people spend in non-existence.

Cant you just take people from the track with reincarnating people? They might have to die a couple of times, but thats nothing compared to infinity

I think the ones in the loop become Cenobites.

Isn't Stockholm Syndrome fake?

Well their heads aren't on the tracks and they're immortal, I bet we could rig some kind of device to make them total praplegics and then work on a direct neural interface so they can use computers while they lay there endlessly having their bodies painlessly trisected.

The abominable billionaire loop makes me happy

Hell couldn't be real because humans would eventually fetishize any pain input and dump buckets forever.

Some webcomic I saw back in the earlier days of the Internet

This is the kind of trolley problem that makes Cenobites.

Also, Option 1 would essentially mean the end of the human race. Assuming the rate of killing is faster than the birth rate it would mean everyone dies soon

Isn't the top case just how things are now?

It can be, usually for college credit though

People really complaining about Calc 2?

Programmer asks: how many bits for the integer?

At 32 bits it's "just" a Thanos snap with extra pain