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Desrtopa comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong
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50 years of torture is going to ruin someone's life. Dust specks and stubbed toes are not going to ruin anyone's life, which makes the number of people with dust specks and stubbed toes irrelevant. That's the threshold. You can't multiply one to get to the other.
The amount humanity loses to a dust speck in someone's eye is exactly 0, unless that person was piloting an aircraft or something and crashes because of it, which - based on my reading of the premise - doesn't seem to be the case. A stubbed toe might cost more, but even that is only true if you treat humanity as an amorpheous, hiveminded mass rather than a group of individuals.
A stubbed toe can put someone in a bad mood which affects their behavior until it feels better, and that can put a damper on their whole day.
I intuitively see 3^^^^3 stubbed toes as worse than 50 years of torture, but not 3^^^^3 dust specks, but this is a scenario where I feel I should at the very least be highly suspicious of my intuition.
Ruining someone's day is still on the other side of the threshold from ruining someone's life. Now, if all the stubbed toes were going to happen to the same person, that would be different.
I guess I could say that the line is between being hurt, and being destroyed. The point at which I would start to look at the man being tortured as a preferable option is when the pain being suffered by the googolplex others would be bad enough to cause serious financial, social, or physical damage to each of them as individuals. That's the line.
If you give a significant fraction of 3^^^^3 people a bad day, it adds up to more time worth of unhappy experience than a 50 year life that is miserable 100% of the time, more times over than we can possibly imagine.
A single second each in the lives of every person on Earth adds up to about 2000 years of cumulative life experience. That's not even a drop in the ocean of 3^^^^3 people.
Of course, if you give even an infinitesimally tiny fraction of that many people, say a trillion, single bad days, that's probably going to lead to at least a few million ruined relationships and lost jobs. 3^^^^3 stubbed toes would lead to more ruined lives than the number of people who've actually ever lived. But even if you assume no spillover effects, it's still a greater mass of cumulative negative experience than has occurred in the entirety of human history.