The event doesn't need to be repeated, the type of event needs to be repeated (whether you'll choose a minor disutility spread to many, or a large disutility to one). And these type of choices do happen repeatedly, all the time, even though most of them aren't about absurdly large numbers like 3^^^3 or absurdly small disutilities like a dust speck.
But that's assuming they are indeed the same type (that the difference in magnitude does not become a difference in type); and if not, it would make a difference whether or not this choice would in fact generalize.
If someone asked you whether it'd be preferable to save a single person from a year's torture, but in return a billion people would have to get their legs broken -- I bet you'd choose to leave the person tortured;
No, I wouldn't, and for the same reason I wouldn't in the dust specks case: the 3^^^3 can collectively buy off the torturee (i.e. provide compensation enough to make the torture preferable given it) if that setup is Pareto-suboptimal, while the reverse is not true.
[EDIT to clarify the above paragraph: if we go with the torture, and it turns out to be pareto-suboptimal, there's no way the torturee can buy off the 3^^^3 people -- it's a case where willingness to pay collides with the ability to pay (or perhaps, accept). If the torturee, in other words, were offered enough money to buy off the others (not part of the problem), he or she would use the money for such a payment.
In contrast, if we went with the dust specks, and it turned out to be Pareto-suboptimal, then the 3^^^3 could -- perhaps by lottery -- come up with a way to buy off the torturee and make a Pareto-improvement. Since I would prefer we be in situations that we can Pareto-improve away from vs those that can't, I prefer the dust specks.
Moreover, increasing the severity of the disutility that the 3^^^3 get -- say, to broken legs, random murder, etc -- does not change this conclusion; it just increases the consumer surplus (or decreases the consumer "deficit") from buying off the torturee. /end EDIT]
Whatever error I've made here does not appear to stem from "poor handling of large numbers", the ostensible point of the example.
This is based on a discussion in #lesswrong a few months back, and I am not sure how to resolve it.
Setup: suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis). The second group is otherwise just as "good" as the first one (loves their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite rational). They just can't help but hate the other guys (this condition is to forestall the objections like "Nazis ought to change their terminal values"). Maybe the shape of Jewish noses just creeps the hell out of them, or something. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no changing that hatred.
Is it rational to exterminate the Jews to improve the Nazi's quality of life? Well, this seems like a silly question. Of course not! Now, what if there are many more Nazis than Jews? Is there a number large enough where exterminating Jews would be a net positive utility for the world? Umm... Not sure... I'd like to think that probably not, human life is sacred! What if some day their society invents immortality, then every death is like an extremely large (infinite?) negative utility!
Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise. This is not an ideal solutions from the Nazi point of view, but it makes them feel a little bit better. And now the utilities are unquestionably comparable, so if there are billions of Nazis and only a handful of Jews, the overall suffering decreases when the Jews are sent to the camps.
This logic is completely analogous to that in the dust specks vs torture discussions, only my "little XML labels", to quote Eliezer, make it more emotionally charged. Thus, if you are a utilitarian anti-specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to herd the Jews into concentration camps, or possibly even exterminate them, provided there are enough Nazi's in the world who benefit from it.
This is quite a repugnant conclusion, and I don't see a way of fixing it the way the original one is fixed (to paraphrase Eliezer, "only lives worth celebrating are worth creating").
EDIT: Thanks to CronoDAS for pointing out that this is known as the 1000 Sadists problem. Once I had this term, I found that lukeprog has mentioned it on his old blog.