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helltank comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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It's not (necessarily) about dust specks accidentally leading to major accidents. But if you think that having a dust speck in your eye may be even slightly annoying (whether you consciously know that or not), the cost you have from having it fly into your eye is not zero.
Now something not zero multiplied by a sufficiently large number will necessarily be larger than the cost of one human being's life in torture.
Now you are getting it copletely wrong. You can´t add up harm on spec dust if it is happening to different people. Every individual has a capability to recover from it. Think about it. With that logic it is worse to rip a hair from every living being in the universe than to nuke New York. If people in charge reasoned that way we might have harmageddon in no time.
That's ridiculous. So mild pains don't count if they're done to many different people?
Let's give a more obvious example. It's better to kill one person than to amputate the right hands of 5000 people, because the total pain will be less.
Scaling down, we can say that it's better to amputate the right hands of 50,000 people than to torture one person to death, because the total pain will be less.
Keep repeating this in your head(see how consistent it feels, how it makes sense).
Now just extrapolate to the instance that it's better to have 3^^^3 people have dust specks in their eyes than to torture one person to death because the total pain will be less. The hair-ripping argument isn't good enough because pain.[ (people on earth) * (pain from hair rip) ] < pain.[(people in New York) * (pain of being nuked) ]. The math doesn't add up in your straw man example, unlike with the actual example given.
As a side note, you are also appealing to consequences.
I think Okeymaker was actually referring to all the people in the universe. While the number of "people" in the universe (defining a "person" as a conscious mind) isn't a known number, let's do as blossom does and assume Okeymaker was referring to the Level I multiverse. In that case, the calculation isn't nearly as clear-cut. (That being said, if I were considering a hypothetical like that, I would simply modus ponens Okeymaker's modus tollens and reply that I would prefer to nuke New York.)