The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in ethics. A runaway trolley is on course to kill several people. You can throw a switch to divert the trolley down another track so it will only kill one person. If you throw the switch, you will cause less harm, but you've still killed a person. If you don't throw the switch, you can consider yourself blameless but more people will die. Mastodon user sidereal gives us the lowdown on how it should really be handled.
This actually comes from railroad workers talking in comments on a fb group. I just made the meme for them.
They were like "those trolley memes are stupid, we have to do this in our railyard like once a week when some intermodal runs loose."
Kudos to the railroad engineers who figured this out long ago, and not to the train robbers who used the scheme to rob passengers. While this explains the trolley example, it does not answer the ethical dilemma at the heart of the question. It just means we really need to come up with a new way to illustrate it. Or not, because the Trolley Problem scenario already asks us to assume a bunch of weird factors, like people being tied to two railroad tracks, and the subject knowing how to switch the tracks. And if you have enough time to consider the implications instead of panicking, why not just untie those people? Here's how a two-year-old solves the problem. I'm glad we had real railroad engineers on it long ago. -via Metafilter