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taw comments on Pain - Less Wrong
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Pain is forced on people; lutefisk, rock climbing, musical theater and gay sex are not. So this comparison is wrong.
From what I can tell BSDM masochists enjoy very narrow and selective kind of "pain"-like sensation, and they tend to dislike pain outside this narrow context as much as everyone else.
That's a strong statement. I can imagine situations where lutefisk could be forced on someone (a child being obliged to eat it by strict Scandinavian parents?) and I don't think that situation would say anything about lutefisk. (It would be a little more complicated to force rock climbing or musical theater on someone. It's possible to force gay sex on someone, but we tend to think that's bad for reasons having little to do with gay sex in general.)
If you compared pain with force-feeding someone lutefisk at gunpoint, or gay rape (that is forcing it on someone who extremely strongly dislikes it, as is almost always the case with pain), then it would be more apt - except we tend to think of them as wrong too.
Under such reasoning, pain itself is not bad, but the conditions which bring it are. However, this distinction is a bit ... too philosophical. When you feel pain, almost always you are unable to remove the pain-causing conditions. Unlike lutefisk, the forcedness is in the very nature of pain.
Pain is often forced on people, but not always. If I disinfect a wound with peroxide, it'll sting. It'd be better if it didn't sting (IMO), but nobody is forcing stinging on me; I voluntarily endure it because I value the other outcome of putting peroxide on the wound. It seems like pain is still bad, just not as bad as increased risk for infection.
Much like how someone who really hated lutefisk would eat it if they were starving and nothing else was available, because enduring the unpleasant eating experience is not as bad as starving to death.
Yes, but I used lutefisk as an example of something that probably isn't bad all by itself, as opposed to pain, which seems like it may be.
Sure, but there are also situations where people seem to seek out and value the sensation of pain itself: masochism, self-injury, and of course The Onion's pain-inducing Advil comes to mind. In these cases I would not say that the pain itself is bad. So the badness still seems to have to do more with the circumstances involved (e.g. involuntariness) than with the sensation itself.
Yes, but you can't dissociate the pain from the healing effect. In that sense, it is enforced. And this is typical for pain: either it comes by accident, or as a side effect of something which outweighs its unpleasantness. Most of people with pain, even if they endure it voluntarily, didn't choose it because of the pain itself, and would prefer the pain go away. Norwegians, on the other hand, eat lutefisk exactly because it is lutefisk.
Note: in fact I don't know much about Norwegians. Perhaps they eat lutefisk because of the force of traditions and hate it actually - but if so, I would have much less difficulties in saying that lutefisk is indeed bad.