I think the point may be: LW orthodoxy, in so far as there is such a thing, says to choose SPECKS over TORTURE [EDITED to add:] ... no, wait, I mean the exact opposite, TORTURE over SPECKS ... and ONE BOX over TWO BOXES, and that combining these in ike's rather odd scenario leads to the conclusion that we should prefer "torture everyone in the universe" over "dust-speck everyone in the universe" in that scenario, which might be a big enough bullet to bite to make some readers reconsider their adherence to LW orthodoxy.

My own view on this, for what it's worth, is that all my ethical intuitions -- including the one that says "torture is too awful to be outweighed by any number of dust specks" and the one that says "each of these vastly-many transitions from which we get from DUST SPECKS to TORTURE is a strict improvement" -- have been formed on the basis of experiences (my own, my ancestors', earlier people in the civilization I'm a part of) that come nowhere near to this sort of scenario, and I don't trust myself to extrapolate. If some incredibly weird sequence of events actually requires me to make such a choice for real then of course I'll have to make it (for what it's worth, I think I would choose TORTURE and ONE BOX in the separate problems and DUST SPECKS in this one, the apparent inconsistency notwithstanding, not least because I don't think I could ever actually have enough evidence to know something was a truly perfect truthful predictor) but I think its ability to tell me anything insightful about my values, or about the objective moral structure of the universe if it has one, is very very very doubtful.