Salivanth comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2008 06:00PM

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Comment author: Salivanth 25 May 2012 12:50:53PM 1 point [-]

You might be right. I'll have to think about this, and reconsider my stance. One billion is obviously far less than 3^^^3, but you are right in that the 10 million dollars stolen by you would be preferable to me than the 100,000 dollars stolen by Eliezer. I also consider losing 100,000 dollars less than or equal to 100,000 times as bad as losing one dollar. This indicates one of two things:

A) My utility system is deeply flawed. B) My utility system includes some sort of 'diffiusion factor' wherein a disutility of X becomes <X when divided among several people, and the disutility becomes lower the more people it's divided among. In essence, there is some disutility for one person suffering a lot of disutility, that isn't there when it's divided among a lot of people.

Of this, B seems more likely, and I didn't take it into account when considering torture vs. dust specks. In any case, some introspection on this should help me further define my utility function, so thanks for giving me something to think about.