If someone dies due to extraneous circumstances, they would die either way so it doesn’t have to factor into your considerations on whether or not to pull the lever.
And while I haven’t done a geometric proof to show that for all odd numbers, it will eventually reduce to one, I’ve worked out the sets for every odd number up to twenty and the pattern holds. While that’s not rigorous enough for a theorem, it’s good enough for me.
It will always reduce to a cycle of 4→2→1→4→2→1, so you won’t end up with a huge number.
But yeah, it would take infinite time to reach infinite loops, and meanwhile people can get on and off, so in reality nobody dies prematurely…
People can die on the trolley,
Also you’re assuming the collatz conjecture.
If someone dies due to extraneous circumstances, they would die either way so it doesn’t have to factor into your considerations on whether or not to pull the lever.
And while I haven’t done a geometric proof to show that for all odd numbers, it will eventually reduce to one, I’ve worked out the sets for every odd number up to twenty and the pattern holds. While that’s not rigorous enough for a theorem, it’s good enough for me.