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TomStocker comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong
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We could go from a day to a minute more slowly; for example, by increasing the number of people by a factor of a googolplex every time the torture time decreases by 1 second.
I absolutely agree that the length of torture increases how bad it is in nonlinear ways, but this doesn't mean we can't find exponential factors that dominate it at every point at least along the "less than 50 years" range.
Obviously. Just important to remember that extremity of suffering is something we frequently fail to think well about.
Absolutely. We're bad at anything that we can't easily imagine. Probably, for many people, intuition for "torture vs. dust specks" imagines a guy with a broken arm on one side, and a hundred people saying 'ow' on the other.
The consequences of our poor imagination for large numbers of people (i.e. scope insensitivity) are well-studied. We have trouble doing charity effectively because our intuition doesn't take the number of people saved by an intervention into account; we just picture the typical effect on a single person.
What, I wonder, are the consequence of our poor imagination for extremity of suffering? For me, the prison system comes to mind: I don't know how bad being in prison is, but it probably becomes much worse than I imagine if you're there for 50 years, and we don't think about that at all when arguing (or voting) about prison sentences.
My heuristic for dealing with such situations is somewhat reminiscent of Hofstadter's Law: however bad you imagine it to be, it's worse than that, even when you take the preceding statement into account. In principle, this recursion should go on forever and lead to you regarding any sufficiently unimaginably bad situation as infinitely bad, but in practice, I've yet to have it overflow, probably because your judgment spontaneously regresses back to your original (inaccurate) representation of the situation unless consciously corrected for.
Obligatory xkcd.
That would have been a better comic without the commentary in the last panel.
But the alt text is great X-)
My feeling is that situations like being caught for doing something horrendous might or might not be subject to psychological adjustment - that many situations of suffering are subject to psychological adjustment and so might actually be not as bad as we though. But chronic intense pain, is literally unadjustable to some degree - you can adjust to being in intense suffering but that doesn't make the intense suffering go away. That's why I think its a special class of states of being - one that invokes action. What do people think?