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Jiro comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion
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That was in response to your idea that small amounts of pain cannot be added up, but large amounts can.
If this is true, then there is a transition point where you go from "cannot be added up" to "can be added up". Around that transition point, there are two pains that are close to each other yet differ in that only one of them can be added up. This leads to the absurd conclusion that you prefer lots of people with one pain to 1 person with the other, even though they are close to each other.
Saying "the trouble with this is that it compares magnitudes that are too close to each other" doesn't resolve this problem, it helps create this problem. The problem depends on the fact that the two pains don't differ in magnitude very much. Saying that these should be treated as not differing at all just accentuates that part, it doesn't prevent there from being a problem.
I'm thinking of the type of scale where any two adjacent points are barely distinguishable but you see qualitative changes along the way; something like this.
That doesn't solve the problem. The transition from "cannot be added up" to "can be added up" happens at two adjacent points.
As I don't think pain can be expressed in numbers, I don't think it can be added up, no matter its magnitude.
In that case, you can't even prefer one person with pain to 3^^^^3 people with the same pain.
(And if you say that you can't add up sizes of pains, but you can add up "whether there is a pain", the latter is all that is necessary for one of the problems to happen; exactly which problem happens depends on details such as whether you can do this for all sizes of pains or not.)