[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

From what I can see, people probably thought you were belaboring a point which was not a part of the discussion at hand. You said you were answering the moral value of "there exists 3^^^3 people AND..." versus the situation without that prefix, but people discussing it did not take that interpretation of the problem, nor did Eliezer when he asked it. You might say that to determine the value of 3^^^3 people getting specks in their eye you would have to presuppose it included the value of them existing, but nobody was discussing that as if it were part of the problem. It sucks, yeah, but the way that people prefer to have discussions wins out, and you can but prefer it or not, or persuade in the right channels. A good lesson to learn, and don't be discouraged.

Hello everyone!

My personal and professional development keep leading me back to the LessWrong sequences, so I've gathered up enough humility to join in the discussions. I hope to meet your high standards.

I'm 27 and my background is in business and the life sciences; I see rationality as a critically important tool in these areas, but ultimately a relatively minor tool for life as a successful human animal. As such I see this community as being similar to a bodybuilding/powerlifting community, where the interest is in training the rational faculty instead of physical strength.

Edit: Wow, all my comments downvoted? That's a pretty strongly negative response. Care to explain?

Surely the incomprehensibly large number is part of the point of the question, otherwise why not use the set of all existing people being dust specked? ~7 billion dustmoted vs. 1 tortured?

Because 7 billion dust specks aren't enough. Obviously.

The point of the question is an extremely large number of tiny disutilities compared to a single vast disutility. When you're imagining 3^^^3 deaths instead and the destruction of the universe, you're kinda missing the point.

The point of the question was to ask us to judge between the disutility of many people dust specked and a single person tortured, not to place a value on whether 3^^^3 existences is itself a bad or a good thing.

So, kinda of the former interpretation, except that the "3^^^3 people" part is merely the setting that enables the question, not really the point of the question...

EDIT: Btw, since I'm an anti-specker, I tried to calculate an upper bound once, for number of specks... It ended up being about 1.2 * 10^20 dust specks

I am not so sure the existence of 3^^^3 people is a bad thing, but even granting that, assume that the 3^^^3 people exist regardless, and the two choices you have are: a) one of them is tortured for 50 years, or b) each and every one of them gets a mote of dust in the eye.

In general, if you find an objection to the premises of a question that does not directly impact the "point" of the question, you should find a variant of the premises that removes that objection, and answer the variant of the question with that as the premise. See The Least Convenient Possible World.

I would suggest the answer is fairly obviously that one person be horribly tortured for 50 years, on the grounds that the idea "there exists 3^^^3 people" is incomprehensible cosmic horror even before you add in the mote of dust.