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

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

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Comment author: Unknown 29 January 2008 10:37:26AM 0 points [-]

Mitchell, if I say an average second of the torture is about equal 10,000 distributed dust specks (notice I said "average second"; there is absolutely no claim that torture adds up linearly or anything like that), then something less than 2 trillion dust specks will be about equal to 50 years of torture. I would arrive at the ratio by some comparison of this sort, trying to guess how bad an average second is, and how many dust specks I would be willing to inflict to save a man from that amount of harm.

Notice that 3^^^3 is completely unnecessary here. That's why I said previously that N doesn't have to be particularly large.