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Quill_McGee comments on [Meta] The Decline of Discussion: Now With Charts! - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's a certain irony to saying this right after you got done talking about the typical-mind fallacy.
"Torture vs. Dust Specks" is one of my least favorite posts on LW, but not because I disagree with the community's conclusions. (I do in letter but not in spirit; I'd pick "specks" as it's stated, but that's because my idea of the pain:suffering mapping, while consequentialist, is non-utilitarian.) Rather, it's proven to be inflammatory far out of proportion to its value as a teaching tool: new posts under it tend to generate more uninformative controversy than actual trolling, even though they're almost always sincere. Almost as bad, we tend to get hung up on useless details of the scenario, even through transposing the core dilemma into any consequential ethic (and a number of non-consequential ones) should be trivial.
A sane community would have realized this, shut the monster up in the proverbial attic, and never spoken of it again. We've instead decided to hold a party in said attic whenever it comes up, with the monster as the star attraction.
Ha. Good point. :)
Perhaps we largely agree, though I think dust specks was a more terrible option to choose for the thought experiment than it sounds like you do. It doesn't work. At all. It's not even interesting... and it was kooky in mind that so many people were pretending like this was some sort of real ethical dilemma.
If you had something that was actually painful to compare the torture to, then you'd have a more difficult putt. As it was, the LWer was presented with something that wasn't even a marginal inconvenience (dust speck), told to "shut up and multiply" by a big number to arrive at a true and unbiased view of ethics...and people actually listened and agreed with this viewpoint.
It might be the culty-est moment of LW. Blindly justifying utter nonsense in the mind of the hive. (It reminds me of the Archer meme... "Do you want people to dismiss you as a crankish cult? Because that's how you get people to dismiss you as a crankish cult." Ha.)
Note: I just mistyped a word and had to delete one letter... how much torture is that marginal inconvenience worth according to DSET (Dust Speck Ethics Theory)? ;)
Okay, guess it falls on me to bring out a party hat for the monster.
I don't really want to get into the details; there's a thread for that and it isn't this one. But I'll just briefly note that "Specks" is nothing more or less than what you get when you actually take utilitarianism (or some of its relatives) seriously. It breaks if you don't treat all discomfort as a single moral evil (or if a dust speck doesn't register as discomfort), or if you don't treat everyone's discomfort as commensurate, but that's precisely what utilitarianism does -- and as a serious ethical theory it's much older than LW.
The dilemma's ill-posed in several ways, yes; it's been proven many times over to mindkill people; and in any crowd other than this one it'd be a reductio of utilitarianism. But the logic does make sense to me; I just don't buy the premises.
(Incidentally, I'm still not sure whether Eliezer was going for a positive answer. Hardline utilitarianism seems at odds with what he's written elsewhere on the subject of suffering, particularly in Three Worlds Collide -- and note that he never takes an explicit position, he just says that it's obvious.)
I feel that dubious honor goes to the moment when we elected to use an invented word for "cult" in order to decrease the search engine presence of "Less Wrong" + "cult".