[SEQ RERUN] Torture vs. Dust Specks

MinibearRex

Today's post, Torture vs. Dust Specks was originally published on 30 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you had to choose between torturing one person horribly for 50 years, or putting a single dust speck into the eyes of 3^^^3 people, what would you do?

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Today's post, Torture vs. Dust Specks was originally published on 30 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you had to choose between torturing one person horribly for 50 years, or putting a single dust speck into the eyes of 3^^^3 people, what would you do?

Presumably, there's going to be some variation with how the people are feeling. Given 3^^^3 people, this will mean that I can pretty much find someone under any given amount of pleasure/pain.

...

It's the same numbers both ways -- just different people. The only way you could decide which is better is if you care more or less than average about Alice.

If Yudkowsky had set up his thought experiment in this way, I would agree with him. But I don't believe there's any reason to expect there to be a distribution of pain in the way that you describe - or in any case it seems like Yudkowsky's point should generalise, and I'm not sure that it does.

If all 3^^^3 + 1 people are on the pain level of 0, and then I have the choice of bringing them all up to pain level 1 or leaving 3^^^3 of them on pain level 0 and bringing one of them up to pain level 1,000,000,000,000 - I would choose the former.

I may have increased the number of pain units in existence, but my value computation doesn't work by adding up "pain units". I'm almost entirely unconcerned about 3^^^3 people experiencing pain level 1; they haven't reached my threshold for caring about the pain they are experiencing. On the other hand, the individual being tortured is way above this threshold and so I do care about him.

I don't know where the threshold(s) are, but I'm sure that if my brain was examined closely there would be some arbitrary points at which it decides that someone else's pain level has become intolerable. Since these jumps are arbitrary, this would seem to break the idea that "pain units" are additive.

Is the distribution necessary (other than as a thought experiment)?

Simplifying to a 0->3 case: If changing (in the entire universe, say) all 0->1, all 1->2, and all 2->3 is judged as worse than changing one person's 0->3 --for the reason that, for an even distrubution, the 1s and 2s would stay the same number and the 3s would increase with the 1s decreasing-- then for what hypothetical distribution would it be even worse and for what hypothetical distribution would it be less bad? Is it worse if there are only 0s who all become 1s, or is i... (read more)

0DanielLC15y

Why would they all be at pain number zero? I'd expect them to be randomly distributed in all their traits unless specified otherwise. If I give them a mean pain of zero and a standard deviation of 1, there'd be no shortage of people with a pain level of 1,000,000,000,000. The same goes with any reasonable distribtion. If you play around with my paradox a bit more, you can work out that if you have 1,000,000,000,000 people at pain level n, and one person at pain level zero, there must be some n between 0 and 999,999,999,999 such that it's at least as bad to torture the one person as to give the rest dust specks. Where is the marginal disutility like that? If you have 1,000,000,000 people at pain 999,999,999,999, and one at pain 0, would you rather torture the one, or give the 1,000,000,000,000 dust specks? [...] I would expect a cutoff like this would be an approximation. You'd actually think that the marginal disutility of pain starts out at zero, and steadily increases until it approaches one. If this were true, one dust speck would bring the pain to 1, which would make the marginal disutility slightly above zero, so that would have some tiny amount of badness. If you multiply it by 3^^^3, now it's unimaginable.