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Oso_42 comments on Morality open thread - Less Wrong
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The other day, I forgot my eyeglasses at home and while walking I got a good sized piece of dust or dirt lodged in my eye. My eye was incapacitated for the better part of a minute until tears washed it out. I had a bit of an epiphany: 3^^^3 dust specks suddenly seems a lot scarier, something you obviously need to agregate and assign a monstrous pile of disutility to. So Basically I have updated my position on torture vs specks.
Alternative explanation is that you now have "dust speck" in near mode, and "torture" in far mode.
I am curious whether 50 years of torture would make you update in the other direction... :P
The way I phrase it is, do I prefer a one-in-3^^^3 chance of 50 years of torture, or a sure chance of a dust speck in the eye? If a Fairy came by and offered you a magical protection against dust speck, but each dustspeck warded (provided it would have been large enough to be noticeable) has a 1-in-3^^^3 chance of sending you to the torture chamber - would you accept the fairy's offer?
Note that a one-in-3^^^3 scenario is less likely than Barack Obama kicking down my door and declaring his undying love for me, so probably deserves as much attention.
It deserves much less attention!
3^^^3 times less attention.
Then you may have misunderstood or misremembered the problem statement. From the original article:
So we're not talking here about something that incapacitates the victim's eye for the better part of a minute.
(I don't know that you mis{understood,remembered} the problem statement. Maybe you had a Nasty Dust Speck experience and this made you update your position on Minimal Dust Speck experiences.)
Yeah I forgot about that detail. My position update stands, for as long as it still represents an amount of disutility, the size can't matter in the final count. My right brain still doesn't like it though.