Yeah, evolutionary (in the Universal Darwinian sense that includes Hebbian learning) incentives for a belief, attention signal, meme, or person to game differential comparisons made by overseer/peer algorithms (who are themselves just rent-seeking half the time) whenever possible is a big source of dukkha (suffering, imperfection, off-kilteredness). An example at the memetic-societal level: http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k .

In the torture/specks case it's a little tricky. If no one knows that you're going to be averaging their preferences and won't ever find out, and all of their preferences are already the result of billions of years of self-interested system-gaming, then at least averaging doesn't throw more fuel on the fire. Unless preferences have evolved to exaggerate themselves to game systems-in-general due to incentives caused by the general strategy of averaging preferences, in which case you might want to have precommited to avoid averaging. Of course, it's not like you can avoid having to take the average somewhere, at some level of organization...