You want a scientific scale for measuring pain? Take your pick.
Not only is there no universally standardized measure of pain, the reason why I'm pro-specks is that I don't believe that pain distributed over separate brains is summable. It does not scale.
Elsewhere EY argued that a billion skydivers, each increasing the atmosphere's temperature by a thousandth of a degree, would individually not care about the effect, but collectively kill us all. The reason why the analogy doesn't apply is that all the skydivers are in the same atmosphere, whereas the specks are not hurting the same consciousness. Unless the pain is communicable (via hive mind or what have you), it will still be roundable to zero. You could have as many specks as you like, each of them causing the mildest itch in one eye, and it would still not surpass the negative utility from torturing one person.
Edited to add: I still don't have a clear idea of how infinite specks would change the comparison, but infinites don't tend to occur in real life.
the reason why I'm pro-specks is that I don't believe that pain distributed over separate brains is summable. It does not scale.
If the problem was solvable that easily, it wouldn't be a problem.
Just slightly change the definition of "speck" (or reinterpret the intent of the original definition): let a speck be "an amount of pain just slightly above the threshold where the pain no longer rounds down to zero for an individual". Now would you prefer specks for a huge number of people to torture for one person?
As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.