And tell me, in a universe where a trillion agents individually decide that adding a dust of speck to the lives of 3^^^3 people is in your words "NOT A BIG DEAL", and the end result is that you personally end up with a trillion specks of dust (each of them individually NOT A BIG DEAL), which leave you (and entire multiverses of beings) effectively blind -- are they collectively still not a big deal then?
If it will be a big deal in such a scenario, then can you tell me which ones of the above trillion agents should have preferred to go with torturing a single person instead, and how they would be able to modify their decision theory to serve that purpose, if they individually must choose the specks but collectively must choose the torture (lest they leave entire multiverses and omniverses entirely blind)?
If you have reason to suspect a trillion people are making the same decision over the same set of people the calculation changes since dust specks in the same eye do not scale linearly.
Today's post, Torture vs. Dust Specks was originally published on 30 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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