I expected that my intuitive preference for any number of dust specks over torture would be easy to formalize without stretching it too far. Does not seem like it.
Well, preferences are pretty easy to fit. Utility(world) = e^-(# of specks) - 1000*(# of people getting tortured)
However, note that this still requires that there is some probability of someone being tortured that you would trade a dust speck for.
It doesn't work if you continuously increase the the severity of the minor inconvenience/reduce the severity of torture and try to find where the two become qualitatively comparable, as pointed out in this reply. The only way I see it work is to assign zero disutility to specks (I advocated it originally to be at the noise level). Then I thought that it is possible to have the argument work reasonably well even with a non-zero disutility, but at this point I don't see how.
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