handoflixue comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Desrtopa 05 December 2010 04:58AM

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Comment author: handoflixue 18 December 2010 12:05:50AM 6 points [-]

I'd actually argue that social signaling is probably more important to "common folk" than a lot of the people here. Specifically, the old post about "Why nerds are unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) comes to mind here. I'm entirely willing to say "I'm willing to kill", because I value truth above social signaling

It also occurs to me that a big factor in my answer is that my social circle is full of people that I trust not to distort or misapply my answer. Put me in a sufficiently different social circle and eventually my "survival instincts" will get me to opt out of the problem as an excuse to avoid negative signaling.

If I just really didn't want to kill the fat guy, it'd be much easier to say "oh, goodness, I could never kill someone like that!" rather than opting out of answering by playing to the absurdity of the scenario.