wedrifid comments on The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 January 2008 04:29PM

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Comment author: Jubilee 09 May 2013 09:48:11PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure why this comment was at -1; despite the angry tone, it makes some interesting points. Both the "mental patch" and the "missed orgy" arguments helped me overcome my gut reaction and think more objectively about the situation.

While reading through this and the other "speck vs torture" threads, many of the important ideas were just clarifications or modifications of the initial problem: for example, replacing "dust speck" (which rounds to 0 in my head, even if it shouldn't) with "toe stub" or "face punch", and suddenly the utilitarian answer becomes much more intuitive for me. Same for replacing "torture" with "missed a 50-year party". I'm still pretty sure if faced with the choice as originally stated, I would choose specks, but at least I'd feel morally bad about it :P

Comment author: wedrifid 10 May 2013 01:04:30AM *  1 point [-]

I'm not sure why this comment was at -1; despite the angry tone, it makes some interesting points.

I've just downvoted it at your prompting. It raised confused, nonsense points with both excessive confidence and completely unnecessary tone.

As noted above, 50 years of torture WITHOUT ANY CONSEQUENCES is a fucking useless, contradictory definition that's part of an overzealous effort to confuse intuition.

Torture without any consequences except the torture itself is not contradictory. The claim of 'overzealous effort to confuse intuition' is also absurd. Even if multiheaded's objection were remotely reasonable it clearly isn't the case that the scenario was constructed in that way with a motive of overzealous effort to confuse intuition. That is just terrible mind reading (to the extent that the accusation is disingenuous).