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aausch comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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The reasoning here seems very broken to me (I have no opinion on the conclusion yet):
Look at a version of the reverse dial. Say that you start with 3^^^3 people having 1000000 dust-specks a second rubbed in their eye, and 0 people tortured. Each time you turn the dial up by 1, 1 person is moved over from the "speck in the eye" list over to the "tortured for 50 years" list, and the frequency is reduced by 1 spec/second. Would you turn the dial up to 1000000?
So because there is a continuum between the right answer (lots of torture) and the wrong answer (3^^^3 horribly blinded people), you would rather blind those people?
Nah, he was pretty clearly challenging the use of induction in the above post.
The larger problem is assuming linearity in an obviously nonlinear situation - this also explains why the induction appears to work either way. Applying 1 pound of force to someone's kneecap is simply not 1/10th as bad as applying 10 pounds of force to someone's kneecap.