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Okeymaker comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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Okeymaker, I think the argument is this:
Torturing one person for 50 years is better than torturing 10 persons for 40 years.
Torturing 10 persons for 40 years is better than torturing 1000 persons for 10 year.
Torturing 1000 persons for 10 years is better than torturing 1000000 persons for 1 year.
Torturing 10^6 persons for 1 year is better than torturing 10^9 persons for 1 month.
Torturing 10^9 persons for 1 month is better than torturing 10^12 persons for 1 week.
Torturing 10^12 persons for 1 week is better than torturing 10^15 persons for 1 day.
Torturing 10^15 persons for 1 day is better than torturing 10^18 persons for 1 hour.
Torturing 10^18 persons for 1 hour is better than torturing 10^21 persons for 1 minute.
Torturing 10^21 persons for 1 minute is better than torturing 10^30 persons for 1 second.
Torturing 10^30 persons for 1 second is better than torturing 10^100 persons for 1 millisecond.
Torturing for 1 millisecond is exactly what a dust speck does.
And if you disagree with the numbers, you can add a few millions. There is still plenty of space between 10^100 and 3^^^3.
Yes, if this is the case (would be nice if Eliezer confirmed it) I can see where the logic halts from my perspective :)
Explanatory example if someone care:
I disagree. From my moral standpoint AND from my utility function whereas I am a bystander and perceive all humans as a cooperating system and want to minimize the damages to it, I think that it is better for 10^30 persons to put up with 1 second of intense pain compared to a single one who have to survive a whole minute. It is much, much more easy to recover from one second of pain than from being tortured for a minute.
And spec dust is virtually harmless. The potential harm it may cause should at least POSSIBLY be outweighted by the benefits, e.g. someone not being run over by a car because he stopped and scratched his eye.
Okay, so let's zoom in here. What is preferable?
Torturing 1 person for 60 seconds
Torturing 100 person for 59 seconds
Torturing 10000 person for 58 seconds
etc.
Kind of a paradox of the heap. How many seconds of torture are still torture?
And 10^30 is really a lot of people. That's what Eliezer meant with "scope insensitivity". And all of them would be really grateful if you spared them their second of pain. Could be worth a minute of pain?
That's fighting the hypothetical. Assume that the speck is such that the harm caused by the spec slightly outweighs the benefits.
Or the benefits could slightly outweigh the harm.
You have to treat this option as a net win of 0 then, because you have no more info to go on so the probs. are 50/50. Option A: Torture. Net win is negativ. Option B: Spec dust. Net win is zero. Make you choice.
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, every dust speck causes a constant small amount of harm with no knock-on effects(no avoiding buses, no crashing cars...)
I thought the original point was to focus just on the inconvenience of the dust, rather than simply propositioning that out of 3^^^3 people who were dustspecked, one person would've gotten something worse than 50 years of torture as a consequence of the dust speck. The latter is not even an ethical dilemma, it's merely an (entirely baseless but somewhat plausible) assertion about the consequences of dust specks in the eyes.
exactly! No knock-on effects. Perhaps you meant to comment on the grandparent(great-grandparent? do I measure from this post or your post?) instead?
yeah, clicked wrong button.