Blueberry comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Morendil 01 June 2010 06:04PM

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Comment author: mkehrt 02 June 2010 10:19:15PM 7 points [-]

Forgive me if this is beating a dead horse, or if someone brought up an equivalent problem before; I didn't see such a thing.

I went through a lot of comments on dust specks vs. torture. (It seems to me like the two sides were miscommunicating in a very specific way, which I may attempt to make clear at some point.) But now I have an example that seems to be equivalent to DSvs.T, easily understandable via my moral intuition and give the "wrong" (i.e., not purely utilitarian) answer.

Suppose I have ten people and a stick. The appropriate infinitely powerful theoretical being offers me a choice. I can hit all ten of them with a stick, or I can hit one of them nine times. "Hitting with a stick" has some constant negative utility for all the people. What do I do?

This seems to me to be exactly dust specks vs. torture scaled down to humanly intuitable scales. I think the obvious answer is to hit all the people once. Examining my intuition tells me that this is because I think the aggregation function for utility is different across different people than across one person's possible futures. Specifically, my intuition tells me to maximize across people the minimum expected utilty across an individual's future.

So, is there a name for this position?

Do people think my example is equivalent to DSvsT?

Do people get the same or different answer with this question as they do with DSvsT?

Comment author: Blueberry 02 June 2010 10:24:58PM 2 points [-]

There's one difference, which is that the inequality of the distribution is much more apparent in your example, because one of the options distributes the pain perfectly evenly. If you value equality of distribution as worth more than one unit of pain, it makes sense to choose the equal distribution of pain. This is similar to economic discussions about policies that lead to greater wealth, but greater economic inequality.