To consider it like this misses the point of the exercise: which is to treat each individual dust speck as the tiniest amount of disutility you can imagine, and multiply those tiny disutilities. If you treat the dust specks differently, as representing a small probability of a huge disutility(death) instead, the equation becomes different in the minds of many, because it's now about adding small probabilities instead of adding small disutilities.
In short: you ought consider the least convenient world, in which you are assured that the momentary inconvenience/annoyance of the dust speck is all the disutility these people will suffer if you choose "dust specks" -- they won't be involved in accidents of any kind, etc.
Well, in that case, you're specifying that the additional stress is being applied to people who can take it.
Let's turn the whole danged thing around: Would you rather that 3^^^^3 people got one less dust speck in their eyes (in times when dust specks were not the limiting factor on much more important activities), or prevent one person from being horribly tortured for 50 years?
A related question would go: Would you volunteer not to have your dust speck count reduced, with it understood that A) if 3^^^3 people volunteer for this, someone will not be torture...
Today's post, Torture vs. Dust Specks was originally published on 30 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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