I was reading the original comment thread on Torture vs. Dust Specks, and notice Eliezer saying he wouldn't pay a penny to avoid a single dust speck - which confused me, until I noticed that the original specification of the problem says the dust speck "floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck." I guess I blanked that out when I first read the post. My default visualization when I imagine "dust speck in my eye" is something substantially more annoying than that.
This leads me to wonder if people would have responded differently if instead of going out of his way to make the alternative to torture involve something as trivial-sounding as possible, Eliezer had gone for some merely minor mishap - say, getting shampoo in your eye. After all, lots of us have gotten shampoo in our eyes at least once (maybe when we were kids), and it's easy to imagine paying $2.99 for a bottle of won't-irritate-your-eyes shampoo over an otherwise identical $2.98 bottle that will hurt if you get it in your eyes (or your kid's eyes, if you're totally confident that, as an adult, you'll be able to keep shampoo out of your eyes).
From there, it's easy to argue that if you're honest with yourself you wouldn't pay $(3^^^3/100) to save one person from being tortured for 50 years, so you should choose one person getting tortured for 50 years over 3^^^3 people getting shampoo (the stingy kind) in their eyes. I suppose, however, that might not change your answer to torture vs. specks if you think there's a qualitative difference between the speck (as originally specified by Eliezer) and getting shampoo in your eye.
I agree with you entirely.
I'm not saying I'd be better off having picked it. For the vast majority of numbers, I absolutely would not be. [EDIT: Well, assuming no knock-on effects from the torture, which EY's initial formulation assumed.]
I'm saying it's probably what I would, in fact, pick, if I were somehow in the epistemic state of being offered that choice. Yes, scale insensitivity and discounting play a role here, as does my confidence that I'm actually being offered an arbitrarily large number of annual minor annoyances (and the associated years of life).
Of course, it depends somewhat on the framing of the question. For example, if you tortured me for half an hour and said "OK, I can either keep doing that for the next 50 years, or I can stop doing that and annually annoy you mildly for the rest of your immortal life," I would definitely choose the latter. (Really, I'd probably agree to anything that included stopping the torture and didn't violate some sacred value of mine, and quite likely I'd agree to most things that did violate my sacred values. Pain is like that.)
Yosarian2 keeps framing the question in terms of "what would you choose?" rather than "what would leave you better off?", and then responding to selections of torture (which make sense in EY's framing) with incredulity that anyone would actually choose torture.
At some point, fighting over the framing of the problem isn't worth my time: f they insist on asking a (relatively trivial) epistemic question about my choices, and insist on ignoring the (more interesting) question of what would leave me better off, at some point I just decide to answer the question they asked and be done with it.
This is similar to my response to many trolley questions: faced with that choice, what I would actually do is probably hesitate ineffectually, allowing the 5 people to die. But the more interesting question is what I believe I ought to do.
Well... ideally, what you choose is what would leave you better off, and is chosen with this in mind. What you do ought to be what you ought to do, and what you ought to do ought to be what you do. Anything out of line with this either damages you unnecessarily or acknowledges that the you that might have desired the ought-choice is dead.