If the dust speck has a slight tendency to be bad, 3^^^3 wins.
Only if you agree to follow EY in consolidating many different utilities in every possible case into one all-encompassing number, something I am yet to be convinced of, but that is beside the point, I suppose.
If it does not have a slight tendency to be bad, it is not "the least bad bad thing that can happen to someone" - pick something worse for the thought experiment.
Sure, if you pick something with a guaranteed negative utility and you think that there should be one number to bind them all, I grant your point.
However, this is not how the problem appears to me. A single speck in the eye has such an insignificant utility, there is no way to estimate its effects without knowing a lot more about the problem.
Basically, I am uncomfortable with the following somewhat implicit assumptions, all of which are required to pick torture over nuisance:
A breakdown in any of these assumptions would mean needless torture of a human being, and I do not have enough confidence in EY's theoretical work to stake my decision on it.
Only if you agree to follow EY in consolidating many different utilities in every possible case into one all-encompassing number, something I am yet to be convinced of, but that is beside the point, I suppose.
If you have a preference for some outcomes versus other outcomes, you are effectively assigning a single number to those outcomes. The method of combining these is certainly a viable topic for dispute - I raised that point myself quite recently.
...Sure, if you pick something with a guaranteed negative utility and you think that there should be one
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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