One way to think about this is to focus on how small one person is compared to 3^^^3 people. You're unlikely to notice the dust speck each person feels, but you're much, much less likely to notice the one person being tortured against a background of 3^^^3 people. You could spend a trillion years searching at a rate of one galaxy per Planck time and you won't have any realistic chance of finding the person being tortured.
Of course, you noticed the person being tortured because they were mentioned in only a few paragraphs of text. It makes them more noticeable. It doesn't make them more important. Every individual is important. All 3^^^3 of them.
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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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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