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polymathwannabe comments on Irrationality Game III - Less Wrong
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I'm 99% confident that dust specks in 3^^^3 eyes result in less lost utility than 50 years of torturing one person.
Utility seems underspecified here.
I agree with you (maybe not 99% certainty though), and I'm surprised more people do not.That is, assuming the original stipulation of the dust specks causing only a "mild inconvenience" for everyone, and not some sort of bell curve of inconvenience with a mean of "mild". People around here seem to grok the idea of the hedonic treadmill, so why don't they apply that idea to this situation? Assuming all of those 3^^^3 people all truly only have a "mild inconvenience", I would argue that from a subjective point of view from each individual, the utility of their day as a whole has not been diminished at all.
Actually, the more I think about it, the idea itself is poorly formed. It depends a lot on what sort of inconvenience the dust causes. If it causes 0.00000001% of the people to decide to shoot up a store or something, then I guess the one person being tortured would be better. But if the dust does not cause any sort of cascading effect, if it's truly isolated to the lost utility of the dust itself, then I'd say the dust is better.
Elsewhere I argued that the pain from the dust specks doesn't add up (and is therefore not really comparable to one single person's torture) unless the victims are forming a hive mind. What the thought experiment is actually comparing is one instance of horrible pain versus many, many individual and not groupable instances of minor discomfort.