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ArisKatsaris comments on Metacontrarian Metaethics - Less Wrong
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I think it is. Imagine that the same trade is offered you a trillion times. Or imagine that it's automatically offered or rejected (unconsciously by default, but you have the ability to change the default) every second of your life.
After spending a week getting a dust speck in the eye every single second, I think you'll do the math and opt to be choosing the 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance of torture instead.
That is an entirely different scenario than what Prismattic is describing. In fact, a dust speck in the eye every single second would be an extremely effective form of torture.
Indeed. More abstractly: pleasure and suffering aren't so nice as to neatly add and multiply like pretty little scalars.
Even if you wish to talk about "utils/utilons" - it is by no means obvious that ten dust specks are worth exactly ten times as many (negative) utils as one dust speck.
Getting a dust speck for a moment is a minor nuisance. Getting an uninterrupted series of dust specks forever is torture. It's not a particularly invasive form, but it is debilitating.
He was trying to show the difference between something which actually happens and has an effect versus something which will only happen with a 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance: one exists in this universe, the other does not.
If we changed it to be one dust speck per second and a 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance every second that you are quantum teleported to a random planet in the universe, you'd swallow that planet in the ever-expanding black hole you'd become long, long before you're teleported there.
Okay, what about a dust speck per hour or a dust speck per ten minutes. Still a minor nuisance, but has it reached to the point you'd prefer to have a 1-in-3^^^^^3 chance of being tortured?