mitchell_porter2 comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: mitchell_porter2 25 January 2008 02:08:00AM 4 points [-]

Unknown, there is nothing inherently illogical about the idea of qualitative transitions. My thesis is that a speck of dust in the eye is a meaningless inconvenience, that torture is agony, and that any amount of genuinely meaningless inconvenience is preferable to any amount of agony. If those terms can be given objective meanings, then a boundary exists and it is a coherent position.

I just said genuinely meaningless. This is because, in the real world, there is going to be some small but nonzero probability that the speck of dust causes a car crash, for example, and this will surely be considerably more likely than a positive effect. When very large numbers are involved, this will make the specks worse than the torture.

But the original scenario does not ask us to consider consequences, so we are being asked to express a preference on the basis of the intrinsic badness of the two options.