Clock speed isn't the only measure of CPU performance. In fact, it isn't much of a measure at all, given that new processors are outperforming Pentium 4 chips (ca. 2005) by the factor you'd expect from Moore's law, despite the fact that their clock speeds are lower by as much as a half.

I think that the Torture versus Dust Specks "paradox" was invented to show how utilitarianism (or whatever we're calling it) can lead to on-face preposterous conclusions whenever the utility numbers get big enough. And I think that the intent was for everybody to accept this, and shut up and calculate.

However, for me, and I suspect some others, Torture versus Dust Specks and also Pascal's Mugging have implied something rather different: that utilitarianism (or whatever we're calling it) doesn't work correctly when the numbers get too big.

The idea that multiplying suffering by the number of sufferers yields a correct and valid total-suffering value is not fundamental truth, it is just a naive extrapolation of our intuitions that should help guide our decisions.

Let's consider a Modified Torture versus Specks scenario: You are given the same choice as in the canonical problem, except you are also given the opportunity to collect polling data from every single one of the 3^^^3 individuals before you make your decision. You formulate the following queries:

"Would you rather experience the mild distraction of a dust speck in your eye, or allow someone else to be tortured for fifty years?"

"Would you rather be tortured for fifty years, or have someone else experience the mild discomfort of a dust speck in their eye?"

You do not mention, in either query, that you are being faced by the Torture versus Specks dilemma. You are only allowing the 3^^^3 to consider themselves and one hypothetical other.

You get the polling results back instantly. (Let's make things simple and assume we live in a universe without clinical psychopathy.) The vast majority of respondents have chosen the "obviously correct" option.

Now you have to make your decisions knowing that the entire universe totally wouldn't mind having dust specks in exchange for preventing suffering for one other person. If that doesn't change your decision ... something is wrong. I'm not saying something is wrong with the decision so much as something is wrong with your decision theory.

Issues with the survey:

1. As mentioned elsewhere, politics is Americentric.
2. Race race seems to be missing some categorizations.
3. If you are going to include transgender, you probably should call the others cis. Otherwise you run the risk of implying transgendered people are not "really" their target gender, which is a mess.
4. The question of academic field was poorly phrased. I'm not an academic, so I assumed you meant what academic field was most relevant to my work. But you really should ask this question without referring to academia.
5. The academic question and the question about field of work need more options.
6. Expertise question needs CS as an answer :-)

EDIT: Overall, it's pretty good.

Because so many people are talking about the Newton question, I'm curious, how many people got closer than 7 years? That's how far I was. Also, I put 93% confidence within 15 years.

... from a comment of his on that self-same thread:

If you're postulating new fundamental physics, things that don't show up microscopically but do show up macroscopically, to explain the Born statistics, there would be a hundred better possibilities that don't violate Special Relativity.

I've never understood why the many-world-ers don't see that their particular 'interpretation' is equally as guilty as CI of violating basic physical laws and creating more problems than it solves in general (note: I'm saying both MWI and CI are equally invalid). Ahh, well.

You can never see what changes other people have made since your last commit, because to get the changes, you have to do an update

svn diff -rBASE:HEAD to see the changes since your last update.
svn diff -rHEAD to diff your working tree against the repository.
Which does send the diffs over the web, and is inconveniently slow.

(I'm not a svn user. I just agreed with the initial reaction of "that's ridiculous", and followed it up with "I bet there really is a way to do that" and looked at the manpage.)

I will be camping with Cydonia, a non-theme camp that will be somewhere near 5:15 and F. I hope to see some of you there!

WARNING! The punchline depends on having read the previous comic first!

I found this out the hard way.

But what about Eliezer's reply to Pigliucci's photosynthesis argument? As I understand it, Eliezer's counterargument was that intelligence and consciousness are like math in the sense that the simulation is the same as the real thing. In other words, we don't care about simulated sugar because we want the physical stuff itself, but we aren't so particular when it comes to arithmetic--the same answer in any form will do.

As far as I can tell, this argument still applies to gold unless there are good reasons to think that consciousness is substrate dependent. But as Eliezer pointed out in that diavlog, that doesn't seem likely.