Closet survey #1

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Hm. Upvoted for an honest answer and lack of dissembling. Let's make it harder.

You have a button. If you press the button, you will receive a (free!) delicious pie, and a random child will be tortured for one year. No one will ever know there was any connection to you, and you can even erase your memory so that you won't feel guilty about it afterwards. Assume you like pie. Do you press the button?

scientism17y50

This is very bizarre situation and difficult to think about but I think there's a chance I would press the button. My main issue is that children require some kind of protection because they're our only source of valuable adults. Childhood is probably the worst time to torture people in terms of long-term side effects. But in terms of merely causing the experience of suffering (which I think is what you're getting at) I think torture is value-neutral.

This is a slightly different matter to the one I initially posted about; I don't think the experience of pa... (read more)

1MichaelGR17y

I wouldn't press the button, though I had to think a bit longer about the "erase from memory" part. It reminds me of what Eliezer often says about Friendly AI: "If you offered Gandhi a pill that would make gandhi a murderer, gandhi would refuse to take it." I would also refuse to do it even if my memory could be erased. Somehow, I don't feel it's really relevant, because when I'm considering wether to do it or not, I'm not even thinking about any guilt I might feel, I'm mostly repulsed by torture in general and imagining myself in the place of the person to be tortured.

5anonymous25917y

It's worth pointing out that the original comment concerned living or dying, not torture. Myself, I would avoid the torture button, but would give serious consideration to pressing one that delivered a delicious pie at the cost of painlessly puffing a random faraway person out of existence. If the button delivered a sufficiently large amount of money, I would press it for sure. Would require much more money for torture than death, however. (Like $1 million versus a few bucks.)

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Closet survey #1

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