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OnTheOtherHandle comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong
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Ben Jones didn't recognise the dust speck as "trivial" on his torture scale, he identified it as "zero". There is a difference: If dust speck disutility is equal to zero, you shouldn't pay one cent to save 3^^^3 people from it. 0 * 3^^^3 = 0, and the disutility of losing one cent is non-zero. If you assign an epsilon of disutility to a dust speck, then 3^^^3 * epsilon is way more than 1 person suffering 50 years of torture. For all intents and purposes, 3^^^3 = infinity. The only way that Infinity(X) can be worse than a finite number is if X is equal to 0. If X = 0.00000001, then torture is preferable to dust specks.
Well, he didn't actually identify dust mote disutility as zero; he says that dust motes register as zero on his torture scale. He goes on to mention that torture isn't on his dust-mote scale, so he isn't just using "torture scale" as a synonym for "disutility scale"; rather, he is emphasizing that there is more than just a single "(dis)utility scale" involved. I believe his contention is that the events (torture and dust-mote-in-the-eye) are fundamentally different in terms of "how the mind experiences and deals with [them]", such that no amount of dust motes can add up to the experience of torture... even if they (the motes) have a nonzero amount of disutility.
I believe I am making much the same distinction with my separation of disutility into trivial and non-trivial categories, where no amount of trivial disutility across multiple people can sum to the experience of non-trivial disutility. There is a fundamental gap in the scale (or different scales altogether, à la Jones), a difference in how different amounts of disutility work for humans. For a more concrete example of how this might work, suppose I steal one cent each from one billion different people, and Eliezer steals $100,000 from one person. The total amount of money I have stolen is greater than the amount that Eliezer has stolen; yet my victims will probably never even realize their loss, whereas the loss of $100,000 for one individual is significant. A cent does have a nonzero amount of purchasing power, but none of my victims have actually lost the ability to purchase anything; whereas Eliezer's, on the other hand, has lost the ability to purchase many, many things.
I believe utility for humans works in the same manner. Another thought experiment I found helpful is to imagine a certain amount of disutility, x, being experienced by one person. Let's suppose x is "being brutally tortured for a week straight". Call this situation A. Now divide this disutility among people until we have y people all experiencing (1/y)*x disutility - say, a dust speck in the eye each. Call this situation B. If we can add up disutility like Eliezer supposes in the main article, the total amount of disutility in either situation is the same. But now, ask yourself: which situation would you choose to bring about, if you were forced to pick one?
Would you just flip a coin?
I believe few, if any, would choose situation A. This brings me to a final point I've been wanting to make about this article, but have never gotten around to doing. Mr. Yudkowsky often defines rationality as winning - a reasonable definition, I think. But with this dust speck scenario, if we accept Mr. Yudkowsky's reasoning and choose the one-person-being-tortured option, we end up with a situation in which every participant would rather that the other option had been chosen! Certainly the individual being tortured would prefer that, and each potentially dust-specked individual* would gladly agree to experience an instant of dust-speckiness in order to save the former individual.
I don't think this is winning; no one is happier with this situation. Like Eliezer says in reference to Newcomb's problem, if rationality seems to be telling us to go with the choice that results in losing, perhaps we need to take another look at what we're calling rationality.
*Well, assuming a population like our own, not every single individual would agree to experience a dust speck in the eye to save the to-be-tortured individual; but I think it is clear that the vast majority would.
Another thing that seems to be a factor, at least for me, is that there's a term in my utility function for "fairness," which usually translates to something roughly similar to "sharing of burdens." (I also have a term for "freedom," which is in conflict with fairness but is on the same scale and can be traded off against it.)
Why wouldn't this be a situation in which "the complexity of human value" comes into play? Why is it wrong to think something along the lines of, "I would be willing to make everyone a tiny bit worse off so that no one person has to suffer obscenely"? It's the rationale behind taxation, and while it's up for debate many Less Wrongers support moderate taxation if it would help a few people a lot while hurting a bunch of people a little bit.
Think about it: the exact number of dollars taken from people in taxes don't go directly toward feeding the hungry. Some of it gets eaten up in bureaucratic inefficiencies, some of it goes to bribery and embezzlement, some of it goes to the military. This means if you taxed 1,000,000 well-off people $1 each, but only ended up giving 100 hungry people $1000 each to stave of a painful death from starvation, we as utilitarians would be absolutely, 100% obligated to oppose this taxation system, not because it's inefficient, but because doing nothing would be better. There is to be no room for debate; it's $100,000 - $1,000,000 = net loss; let the 100 starving peasants die.
Note that you may be a libertarian and oppose taxation on other grounds, but most libertarians wouldn't say you are literally doing morality wrong if you think it's better to take $1 each from a million people, even if only $100,000 of it gets used to help the poor.
I could easily be finding ways to rationalize my own faulty intuitions - but I managed to change my mind about Newcomb's problem and about the first example given in the above post despite powerful initial intuitions, and I managed to work the latter out for myself. So I think, if I'm expected to change my mind here, I'm justified in holding out for an explanation or formulation that clicks with me.
That makes no sense. Just because one thing cost $1, and another thing cost $1000, does not mean that the first thing happening 1001 times is better than the second one happening once.
Preferences logically precede prices. If they didn't, nobody would be able to decide what they were willing to spend on anything in the first place. If utilitarianism requires that you decide the value of things based on their prices, then utilitarians are conformists without values of their own, who derive all of their value judgments from non-utilitarian market participants who actually have values.
(Besides, money that is spent on "overhead" does not magically disappear from the economy. Someone is still being paid to do something with that money, who in turn buys things with the money, and so on. And even if the money does disappear -- say, dollar bills are burnt in a furnace -- it still would not represent a loss of productive capacity in the economy. Taxing money and then completely destroying the money (shrinking the money supply) is sound monetary policy, and it occurs on a regular (cyclical) basis. Your whole argument here is a complete non-starter.)