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This is exactly what bothered me about the story, actually. You can choose to help the child and possibly doom Omelas, or you can choose not to, for whatever reason. But walking away doesn't solve the problem!
True. On reflection, it's patently obvious that the Less Wrong way to deal with Omelas is not to accept that the child's suffering is necessary to the city's welfare, and dedicate oneself to finding the third alternative. "Some of them understand why," so it's obviously possible to know what the connection is between the child and the city; knowing that, one can seek some other way of providing whatever factor the tormented child provides. That does mean allowing the suffering to go on until you find the solution, though -- if you free the child and ruin Omelas, it's likely too late at that point to achieve the goal of saving both.
If dust specks have a value of 0, then what's the smallest amount of discomfort that has a nonzero value instead? Use that as your replacement dust speck.
And of course, the disutility of torture certainly increases in nonlinear ways with time. The 3^^^3 is there to make up for that. 50 years of torture for one person is probably not as bad as 25 years of torture for a trillion people. This in turn is probably not as bad as 12.5 years of torture for a trillion trillion people (sorry my large number vocabulary is lacking). If we keep doing this (halving the torture length, multiplying the number of people by a trillion) then are we always going from bad to worse? And do we ever get to the point where each individual person tortured experiences about as much discomfort as our replacement dust speck?
If dust specks have a value of 0, then what's the smallest amount of discomfort that has a nonzero value instead?
I don't know exactly where I'd make the qualitative jump from the "discomfort" scale to the "pain" scale. There are so many different kinds of unpleasant stimuli, and it's difficult to compare them. For electric shock, say, there's probably a particular curve of voltage, amperage and duration below which the shock would qualify as discomfort, with a zero value on the pain scale, and above which it becomes pain (I'll even go so far as to say that for short periods of contact, the voltage and amperage values lies between those of a violet wand and those of a stun gun). For localized heat, I think it would have to be at least enough to cause a small first-degree burn; for localized cold, enough to cause the beginnings of frostbite (i.e. a few living cells lysed by the formation of ice crystals in their cytoplasm). For heat and cold over the whole body, it would have to be enough to overcome the body's natural thermostat, initiating hypothermia or heatstroke.
It occurs to me that I've purposefully endured levels of discomfort I would probably regard as pain with a non-zero value on the torture scale if it was inflicted on me involuntarily, as a result of working out at the gym (which has an expected payoff in health and appearance, of course), and from wearing an IV for two 36-hour periods in a pharmacokinetic study for which I'd volunteered (it paid $500); I would certainly do so again, for the same inducements. Choice makes a big difference in our subjective experience of an unpleasant stimulus.
50 years of torture for one person is probably not as bad as 25 years of torture for a trillion people.
Of course not; by the scale I posited above, 50 years for one person isn't even as bad as 25 years for two people.
If we keep doing this (halving the torture length, multiplying the number of people by a trillion) then are we always going from bad to worse?
No, but the length has to get pretty tiny (probably somewhere between a millisecond and a microsecond) before we reverse the direction.
And do we ever get to the point where each individual person tortured experiences about as much discomfort as our replacement dust speck?
Yes, we do; in fact, we eventually get to a point where each person "tortured" experiences no discomfort at all, because the nervous system is not infinitely fast nor infinitely sensitive. If you're using temperature for your torture, heat transfer happens at a finite speed; no matter how hot or cold the material that touches your skin, there's a possible time of contact short enough that it wouldn't change your skin temperature enough to cause any discomfort at all. Even an electric shock could be brief enough not to register.
In response to
Torture vs. Dust Specks
Incidentally, I think that if you pick "dust specks," you're asserting that you would walk away from Omelas; if you pick torture, you're asserting that you wouldn't.
In response to
Torture vs. Dust Specks
I don't see that it's necessary -- or possible, for that matter -- for me to assign dust specks and torture to a single, continuous utility function. On a scale of disutility that includes such events as "being horribly tortured," the disutility of a momentary irritation such as a dust speck in the eye has a value of precisely zero -- not 0.000...0001, but just plain 0, and of course, 0 x 3^^^3 = 0.
Furthermore, I think the "minor irritations" scale on which dust specks fall might increase linearly with the time of exposure, and would certainly increase linearly with number of individuals exposed to it. On the other hand, the disutility of torture, given my understanding of how memory and anticipation affect people's experience of pain, would increase exponentially over time from a range of a few microseconds to a few days, then level off to something less than a linear increase with acclimatization over the range of days to years. It would increase linearly with the number of people suffering a given degree of pain for a given amount of time. (All other things being equal, of course. People's pain tolerance varies with age, experience, and genetics; it would be much worse to inflict any given amount of pain on a young child than on an adult who's already gone through, say, Navy S.E.A.L. training, and thus demonstrated a far higher-than-average pain tolerance.)
Thus, it would be enormously worse to inflict X amount of pain on one individual for sixty minutes than on 60 individuals for one minute each, which in turn would be much worse than inflicting the same pain on 3600 individuals for one second each -- and if we could spread it out to a microsecond each for 36,000,000 people, the disutility might vanish altogether as the "experience" becomes too brief for the human nervous system to register at all, and thus ceases to be an experience. However, once we get past where acclimatization inflects the curve, it would be much worse to torture 52 people for one week each than to torture one person for an entire year. It might even be worse to torture ten people for one week each than one for an entire year -- I'm not sure of the precise values involved in this utility function, and happily, at the fine scale, I'll probably never need to work them out (the empirical test is possible in principle, of course, but could only be performed in practice by a fiend like Josef Mengele).
There's also the fact that knowing many people can and have endured a particular pain seems to make it more endurable for others who are aware of that fact. As Spider Robinson says, "Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened" -- I don't know if that really "refutes entropy," but both of those clauses are true individually. That's part of the reason egalitarianism, as other commenters have pointed out, has positive utility value.
In response to
The Third Alternative
Here's another Noble Lie: protectionism--that there's somehow a morally and practically important difference between trading inside your borders and trading outside them. It may not be quite as good as Santa Claus, though.
The idea that torture is efficacious for getting accurate information might be Noble Lie (if you accept that causing pain to someone helpless is a benefit, thus making torture a self-seeking behavior), but that one might be too contentious for most discussions.
I suspect that the hook for adults in the Santa Claus story is a "benefit" of that kind--lying to someone who doesn't have the capacity to check on what you're saying.
That five minutes brainstorming is an interesting idea. Would another five minutes spent on looking at your preferred alternative from the points of view of all the interested parties also be a good investment?
Here's another Noble Lie: protectionism--that there's somehow a morally and practically important difference between trading inside your borders and trading outside them.
That would depend on whether there are any morally and practically important differences between the environmental, labor, etc. practices found inside your borders vs. those found elsewhere. Protecting the income of free, paid laborers from competition by slaveowners whose victims can produce the same goods less expensively seems pretty morally and practically important to me.
In response to
Dark Side Epistemology
I am being forthright, not obtuse. I say again that there is no statement of the form "I feel that X", which would not be rendered more accurate by replacing it with "I believe that X". That people use the word "feel" in this way does not make it a statement about feelings: it remains a statement about beliefs. Neither of those statements actually contains any expression of a feeling about X. Here is one that does: "I am angry that X". Compare "I feel that X" -- what is the feeling? It is not there. In a larger context, the listener may be able to tell, but if they can, they can do so equally well from "I believe that X".
I believe that "I believe that a sequel to The Hobbit should never be made" is emotionally based.
It might well be. But the emotions would not be communicated any better by using the word "feel". They are not communicated at all by either word. (I can think of other reasons why someone might object to a sequel: for example, some people have an ethical objection to fanfiction.)
And no, I've never actually responded to an "I feel that" with a blunt "No you don't". It would rarely help. But I do know people that would call me on it if I ever used the expression, as I would them. A lot of the time -- I am talking about actual, specific experience here, not vague generalisation -- people react emotionally to beliefs they are holding that they have never actually stated out loud as beliefs, and asked "Are these actually true?" Until you have noticed what you believe, you cannot update your beliefs. I-feel-thats avoid that confrontation.
To use "feel", as a couple of people suggested, to mean "tentative belief" changes only the map: there are still no actual feelings being expressed, just a word that has been blurred. This does not grease the wheels of discourse, it gums them up. Better to reserve "feel" for feelings and "believe" for beliefs, for it is a short step from calling them both by the same name to passing them off as the same thing, and then you are on the Dark Side, whether you know it or not. State something as a belief and you open yourself to the glorious possibility of being proved wrong. Call it a feeling and you give yourself a licence to ignore reality.
Probably silly to reply almost four years later, but what the heck. I think that in a lot of cases "I feel that X" is a statement of belief in belief. That is, what the person really means is "I believe that X should be true," or "I have an emotional need to believe that X is true regardless of whether it is or not." Since you're very unlikely to get someone who think "I feel that X" is a valid statement in support of X to admit what they really mean, it is indeed an excellent example of Dark epistemology.
In response to
Self-Anchoring
Huh. My first thought on comprehending Keysar et. al.'s experiment was that it would make a good test for detecting telepaths trying to conceal their abilities (as, for example, in <i>Babylon 5</>). Not something we're ever likely to need in real life, of course, but it could serve the purpose of a Voight-Kampff test in somebody's B-5 fan-fic.
In response to
Psychic Powers
A few things.
First, I have actually been through a process of diagnosis that I submitted myself to for this very purpose -- to uncover whatever underlying neurological issue I had. They found nothing out of the ordinary, and I function perfectly well. I am well adjusted, not on medication, and otherwise "normal."
Second, comments like Eli's about the lottery aren't fair, because I never claimed to be omniscient, only to have some sort of extra perception.
Imagine a scenario in which the world is filled with deaf people. Human beings have never had a sense of hearing. I, through some genetic quirk, am born with a sense of hearing, however faint it may be, and I am faced with convincing the people around me that I can "hear." My first obstacle is to explain what hearing even means to someone who has no basis for understanding it.
Even if they were able to form a mental image of what a sound might be like (I'm not sure how they would, but for the sake of argument...), they wouldn't have a sense of the boundaries. Why can I hear air planes that are very far away from me but not hear what's going on in the next room very well?
I cannot see lotto numbers, I'm afraid... however, and this brings me to the next point, I can "see" people's superficial thoughts and one great way to demonstrate it is paper rock scissors.
I have done an experiment in which I played 100 games in a row with my wife, and wrote down the results. I can see which she'll throw, and I'll throw the opposite. I won 90% of the time (91 I think, but I didn't keep the paper I wrote it on). That's not really possible statistically.
You might wonder why I don't submit myself to public scrutiny if my results are so consistent. Frankly, I'm terrified of it. Anyone who cared to test me would be doing so in the spirit of "outing" me, with the attitude that I was a crackpot... I don't generally enjoy such circumstances.
If I did go forward in the interest of research, despite my personal reservations, then I know any mistake on my part would be magnified by the researchers and public to debunk me thanks to confirmation bias. In addition, I would expect to be faced with experiments devised in ignorance and so I'd be asked questions like "what are tomorrow's lotto numbers?"
Frankly, under those conditions, I will fail. I am not that good. It's a weaker sense that's easily overwhelmed by the normal senses and by emotions, and I'm not that good. I couldn't perform under pressure.
Even if I could, there would be very little upside: if I perform less than optimally, I'd be chided as an idiot or charlatan, and if I performed perfectly the experiments would be disregarded as flawed, and the subject matter silly. That's all without mentioning the possible damage to my reputation... there's not a lot of incentive.
Probably silly replying at this late date, but I'm going to do it anyway: Texas Holdem against strangers would be a much more compelling demonstration than RPS with your wife, and lucrative, too, if your powers are real. Surface thoughts should be sufficient to tell you when people are bluffing and when they genuinely have a strong hand, even if they don't tell you exactly what cards they hold. Better yet, they should tell you when your opponents are confident enough to call your bluff, and when they're not. That would give you a devastating advantage in the game. So I won't hold my breath for your lottery wins, but if you genuinely have the abilities you describe I would expect to hear about your World Series of Poker bracelets.
In response to
Psychic Powers
The SF writer Catherine Asaro came up with a workable explanation of empathy/telepathy that doesn't require non-reductionism, though I don't think it's all that plausible; it's based around quantum entanglement between microstructures in the brains of psions in close proximity to one another (and a lot of hand-waving, of course). In her books, psi powers didn't evolve naturally, but were the result of extensive genetic tinkering by aliens with a far more advanced knowledge of genetics, neurology, and quantum physics than humans presently possess, enabling them to design new brain architecture from scratch, write the genetic code to build it, and insert that code into their subjects' genomes.
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Old School statisticians thought in terms of tools, tricks to throw at particular problems.
This reminds me of a joke posted on a bulletin board in the stats department at UC Riverside. It was part of a list of humorous definitions of statistical terms. For "confidence interval," it said that the phrase uses a particular, euphemistic meaning of the word "interval;" that meaning could be used to construct similar phrases such as "hat interval," "card interval," or "interval or treat."