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

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

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Comment author: Ben_P 30 January 2008 07:18:00PM 0 points [-]

It has 7,625,597,484,987 settings. On setting 1, 1 person is tortured for 50 years plus the pain of one dust speck. On setting 2, 3 persons are tortured for 50 years minus the pain of (50-year torture/7,625,597,484,987), i.e. they are tortured for a minute fraction of a second less than 50 years, again plus the pain of one dust speck. On setting 3, 3^3 persons, i.e. 27 persons, are tortured for 50 years minus two such fractions of a second, plus the pain of one dust speck. On setting 4, 3^27, i.e. 7,625,597,484,987 persons are tortured for 50 years minus 3 such fractions, plus the pain of one dust speck....

Once again, on setting 7,625,597,484,987, 3^^^3 persons are dust specked.

Any particular reason why the lever scales like that? Given a setting s we have the torture time defined by T(s) = 50-0.0002(s-1) and the number of people being tortured defined by P(s) = 3^P(s-1) where P(1) = 1. I see no reason why the torture time should decrease linearly if the number of people being tortured increases super-exponentially.