"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."

A question for comparison: would you rather have a 1/Googolplex chance of being tortured for 50 years, or lose 1 cent? (A better comparison in this case would be if you replaced "tortured for 50 years" with "death".)

Also: for the original metaphor, imagine that you aren't the only person being offered this choice, and that the people suffering the consequences are out of the same pool- which is how real life works, although in this world we have a population of 1 googolplex rather than 7 billion. If we replace "dust speck" with "horribly tortured for 1 second", and we give 1.5 billion people the same choice and presume they all make the same decision, then the choice is between 1.5 billion people being horribly tortured for 50 years, and 1 googolplex people begin horribly tortured for 50 years.