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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities - Less Wrong
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The difference between the dust specks and the white room is that in the case of the dust specks, each experience is happening to a different person. The arbitrarily big effect comes from your consideration of arbitrarily many people - if you wish to reject the arbitrarily big effect, you must reject the independence of how you care about people.
In the case of the white room, everything's happening to you. The arbitrarily big effect comes from your consideration of obtaining arbitrarily many material goods. If you wish to reject the arbitrarily big effect, you must reject the independence of how you care about each additional Mona Lisa. But in this case, unlike in dust specks, there's no special reason to have that independence in the first place.
Now, if the room were sufficiently uncomfortable, maybe I'd off Frank - as long as I was sure the situation wasn't symmetrical. But I don't think we need surreal numbers to describe why, if I get three square meals a day in the white room, I won't kill Frank just to get an infinite amount of food.
Affirm this reply.
Question: I did bring up the idea of infinite Fun v. Frank's life. That seems to me like a tiering decisioin: it's not at all clear to me that a diverging utility like "Immortal + Omega-guaranteed indefinite Fun" is worth Frank's life, which implies that Frank's life is at least on an omega-tier.
So you wouldn't trade whatever amount of time Frank as left, which is at most measured in decades, against a literal eternity of Fun?
If I was Frank in this scenario, I would tell the other guy to accept the deal.
I see my room needs to be even more "white."
... The answer, I suppose, would be "yes." But this wasn't meant to be an immortal v. mortal life thing, just the comparison of two lives - so the obvious steelman is, what if Frank's immortal, and just very, very bored?