paper-machine comments on A response to "Torture vs. Dustspeck": The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Less Wrong

-4 Post author: Logos01 30 November 2011 03:34AM

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Comment author: prase 30 November 2011 12:23:34PM 9 points [-]
  1. As others have said, the scenario doesn't require linearity.
  2. You are doing a fairly standard job of rejecting a thought experiment by pointing out several side issues that are stipulated to be missing in the original. Although this is what people ordinarily do when confronted with a counterintuitive repugnant argument, it muddles the discussion and makes you the person who misses the point. If you want to say that the assumptions of the dust speck dilemma are unrealistic, you are free to do it (although such a statement is rather trivial; nobody believes that there are 3^^^^3 humans in the world). If you, on the other hand, object to the utilitarian principles involved in the answer, then do it. But please don't mix these two types of objections together.
  3. There were already many people who espoused choosing "specks", rationalising it by all sorts of elaborate arguments (not a surprising thing to see, since "specks" is the intuitive answer). This is the easy part. But I haven't seen anybody propose a coherent general decision algorithm which returns "specks" for this dilemma and doesn't return repugnant or even paradoxical answers to different questions. This is the hard part, which if you engaged, it would be much more interesting.
Comment author: [deleted] 30 November 2011 12:36:59PM 6 points [-]

You are doing a fairly standard job of rejecting a thought experiment by pointing out several side issues that are stipulated to be missing in the original. Although this is what people ordinarily do when confronted with a counterintuitive repugnant argument, it muddles the discussion and makes you the person who misses the point.

This seems to be endemic in the discussion section, as of late.

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