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DanielLC comments on Serious Stories - Less Wrong
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There's something I wanted to say about the dusk speck in a Knuth notation number of eyes versus torture for one person; something as light as a speck of dust wouldn't even register, it's noise level, in practice doesn't affect someone one way or the other. A bit in the same idea that you need a signal to reach a certain strength to make a neuron fire. So to make it work, you'd need something that at least makes a difference, even the smallest of differences, in terms of pain.
Now with that being said, different people have different sensibilities. This may even be more the case in the future indeed. But in the end, after writing this, can you still argue that it is preferable to torture someone for 50 years, rather than have an unimaginably high number of people people bearing some minimal pain ?
Being a noise level means you don't notice. It doesn't mean it doesn't register.
If it's small enough, it literally won't register, but there's more to that than just being small. If you get to the point where it registers, and move back epsilon, then all it takes is an epsilon difference. Unless you were very, very careful about how you chose your people, there's going to be an unimaginable number who are within epsilon. Even if you made sure all the people were exactly identical, there's still a chance that they're all within epsilon.