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wedrifid comments on The non-painless upload - Less Wrong
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Someone was an ass in a conversation you were with. Evidently it affected you personally. But you have generalised that to a general assumption of neurosis for a broad class of people who happen to discuss abstract decision problems with 'torture' plugged in as the extreme case. More to the point you actively declare your smug judgement on the broad class 'you people'. Apart from indicating a clearly defective model of human psychology that is unnecessarily anti-social behaviour.
The appropriate response to having an unpleasant conversation with an ass is not to become obnoxious yourself.
It wasn't just one person, it was three or four. And it wasn't just that they INVOKED torture, it was that they clung to it like a life preserver, like it was the magic ingredient for winning the argument.
This is so far outside the bounds of civil discourse, and yet it's routine in this community. I don't think it's unwarranted to be generally concerned.
Also note that, besides thought experiments, "extreme negative utility" is also observed in religious discourse. I'd say Hell is probably the archetypal example of [someone proposing] infini-torture [to win an argument].
Off of the top of my head, torture and similar very unpleasant things are useful for at least two purposes.
As in this post, you could attempt to quantify how much you value something (in this case, effective immortality) by how long you would be willing to exist in an extremely uncomfortable state (such as being tortured.)
Similarly, if someone is attempting to make certain absolute statements (such as "I would never kill another human being.") regardless of circumstance, such conjecture can be used to quantify how much negative utility they attribute to committing such an act.
If you feel severe discomfort in being in a conversation where someone is using torture as a hypothetical, I suppose that you could either leave the conversation or ask them to use a different hypothetical, but the whole point of using torture as a hypothetical in such a case is because it is extremely unpleasant, so their alternative, if chosen well, maybe be equally discomforting to you.
I agree that if clinging desperately to magic assertions for winning arguments were routine in this community, that would warrant concern.
I don't agree that it is, in fact, routine here.