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wedrifid comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Is this one of those "torture one person for 50 years" versus "deaths of millions" thought experiments?
Easiest thought experiments ever?
Would you rather be tortured for 3^^^3 years, or have a dust speck in your eye?
If I use UDT2 can I choose 'both'?
This seems like a good "control" thought experiment to determine whether people are just being contrarian.
I think you'd have to be a pretty unsubtle contrarian to answer that with "torture".
And yet, at least one person below did just that. Edit: ...but later asserted that had been a joke.
I think in this case you can drop the suffix and just say "being contrary".
More like, to determine whether people are paying any attention. (I once took an online personality test which included questions such as “I've never eaten before” to prevent people from using bots or similar to screw up their data.)
It's hard to get people to answer such things straightforwardly. I once included "Some people have fingernails" in a poll, as about the most uncontroversially true thing I could think of, and participants found a way to argue that it wasn't true - since "some" understates the proportion.
Well... Some people does usually implicate ‘not all people, and not even all people except a non-sizeable minority’, but if we go by implicatures rather than literal meanings, X has fingernails (in contexts where everyone knows X is a human), in my experience at least, usually implicates that X's fingernails are not trimmed nearly as short as possible, since the literal meaning would be quite uninformative once you know X is a human.
"There exists at least one X that ..." is what logicians have settled on as the most easily satisfiable and least objectionable phrasing.
That's not that easy, unless having a dust speck in my eye also entails my living for 3^^^3 years.
I nominate ABrooks as this month's contrarian.
This is another great example of a comment that should have been silently downvoted, not responded to.
I generally avoid downvoting comments that are direct responses to me. I'm not exactly sure why, beyond a sense that it just feels wrong, although I can justify it in a number of different ways that I'm pretty sure aren't my real reasons.
I do the same. The reasoning that comes to mind is that the timing tends to imply that you did it, and that that -- especially if you're already in an adversarial mode -- can provoke a cycle of retaliation that's harmful to your karma and doesn't carry much informative value. Short of that, I feel it carries adversarial implications that're harmful to the quality of discussion.
I'm reasonably sure that that's my true objection.
Yeah, that's plausible in my case as well. Evidence in favor of it is that I do become mildly anxious when people who are responding to me get downvoted by others, which suggests that I fear retaliation.
I thought that too, but I assumed I'd die right after being tortured anyway. And I'd rather live to age n without ever being tortured than live to age n + m being tortured for m years.
Wait, what?
To clarify:
A = Dust speck in your eye, and your life is otherwise as it would have been without this deal.
B = 3^^^3 years of torture, followed by death.
Is that an easy choice for you?
If not, can you summarize your arguments in favor of choosing B?
Well, if I choose B, I'll be alive for a very large number of years. I'll be alive so long, that I expect that I'll get used to anything deployed to torture me. And I'll be alive so long, I'd need to study a fair amount of cosmology just to understand what my lifetime will involve, by way of the deaths and rebirths of whole universes or whatever. Some of that would be interesting to see.
The easy thought experiment would be dust speck vs. 3 years of torture followed by death. I think there, I'd go with the speck.
Is this based on the experience of torture victims? I think that "get used to" would more closely resemble "catatonic" than "unperturbed." I don't think your ability to be interested would survive very long.
I wonder if there's a case study of an individual that's been exposed to prolong torture. Probably have to look through Nazi and Japanese experiments.
(takes deep breath)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE
sorry, I just had to scream for a bit
Them dust specks hurtin'?
I...um. Are you agreeing with me? Or did I say something stupid?
I think you can be confident that he's not agreeing with you.
I ask only that people disagree with me in such a way that my errors are corrected.
Until you posted this comment, I thought your response was intended as humor.
Edit: And not of the ha ha only serious type.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
An obvious argument in favor of B is that you get to live for 3^^^3 years. A reframing:
A = Dust speck in your eye, after which you read a normal life except that you cease to exist a mere 60 years later.
B = Tortured for the rest of your life, but you never die.
B is just the traditional idea of hell, isn't it? (IIRC, the present-day Catholic Church's idea is that hell is just the inability to see God.)
(nods) That seemed the obvious argument, as you say, though it depends on the notion that being tortured for a year is a net utility gain (relative to not existing for that year at all), which seemed implausible to me. But it turns out that is indeed what ABrooks meant.
(shrug) No accounting for taste.
Edit: He later asserted that had been a joke.