Not sure what you are asking. My point was that the human notion of torture is apriori a tiny speck in the ocean of possible Turing machines. We don't know nearly enough at this point to worry about accidental or intentional sim torture, so we shouldn't, until at least a ballpark estimate with a few sigma confidence interval can be computed. This is a standard cognitive bias people fall into here and elsewhere: a failure of imagination. In this particular case someone brings up the horrifying possibility of tortured and killed 3^^^3 sims, and the emotional response to it is strong enough to block any rational analysis of the odds of it happening. Also reminds me of people conjuring aliens as human-looking, human-thinking and, of course, emotionally and sexually compatible. EY wrote about how silly this is at some length.
I don't think most people talking about torture vs dust specks actually expect it to happen. And even if it actually could happen, it might be a smart idea to precommit to refuse to play any crazy games with an intelligence that wants to torture people. The point of the discussion is ethics. It's a thought experiment. It's not actually going to happen.
Today's post, The Design Space of Minds-In-General was originally published on 25 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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