Dmytry comments on On accepting an argument if you have limited computational power. - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Dmytry 11 January 2012 05:07PM

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Comment author: Dmytry 12 January 2012 09:01:06PM *  2 points [-]

In the practical reasoning, "A" is a shorthand for "I think A is true", et cetera - no absolute knowledge, nonzero false positive rate, and sufficiently refined moral theory has to take this into account.

Just as thought experiment relying on e.g. absolute simultaneity would render itself irrelevant to special or general relativity, so does trolley problem's implicit assumption of absolute, reliable knowledge render it irrelevant to the extreme cases where the probability of event is much smaller than false positive rate.