Trivial annoyances and torture cannot be compared in this quantifiable manner. Torture is not only suffering, but lost opportunity due to imprisonment, permanent mental hardship, activation of pain and suffering processes in the mind, and a myriad of other unconsidered things.

And even if the torture was 'to have flecks of dust dropped in your eyes', you still can't compare a 'torturous amount' applied to one person, to substantial number dropped in the eyes of many people: We aren't talking about cpu cycles here - we are trying to quantify qualifiables.

If you revised the question, and specified stated exactly how the torture would affect the individual, and how they would react to it, and the same for each of the 'dust in the eyes' people (what if one goes blind? what of their mental capacity to deal with the hardship? what of the actual level of moisture in their eyes, and consequently the discomfort being felt?) then, maybe then, we could determine which was the worse outcome, and by how much.

There are simply too many assumptions that we have to make in this, mortal, world to determine the answer to such questions: you might as well as how many angels dance on the head of a pin. Or you could start more simply and ask: if you were to torture two people in exactly the same way, which one would suffer more, and by how much?

And you notice, I haven't even started to think about the ethical side of the question...

Shakespeare, Feynman wrote that in 1966, which was before Everett's absolutely essentialy (and stunningly obvious in retrospect) insight spread through the physics community. Feynman's claim in 1966 that "Nobody understands QM" thus inadvertantly illustrates one of the other great truths, which is that nobody knows what nobody knows. The accumulated pool of scientific knowledge is far too vast for any one human mind to hold more than a tiny fraction. There are six billion people in the world, and you don't know what they know. Feynman should have stuck to saying "I don't understand QM", to which he could have attested of his own knowledge.

Quantum mechanics really was a very poor choice as my first example, because the application of "Think like reality" to QM is nontrivial. Before you conform your intuitions to reality, you should be very sure of what reality is.

Quantum mechanics tells us unambiguously that reality is over points in configuration space and that quarks and photons have no individual identities - if you pretend that a point in configuration space with photon 1 at A and photon 2 at B is different from a point in configuration space with photon 1 at B and photon 2 at A, you will get the wrong answer. So you have got to toss your intuitive understanding of little billiard balls, because it is definitely wrong, and start trying to wrap your understanding around configuration spaces until they seem normal, because they are definitely normal.

Once you have achieved a state where configuration spaces seem normal, many-worlds will also seem much more normal. If you insist on thinking of particles as individuals you will start to ask nonsensical questions like "Which branch am I in?" or "When does the 'observation' occur?" It seems to me that many-worlds is also cut-and-dried correct, but I understand that the reasons for this verdict may not be easily apparent to everyone. Questions like "How are amplitudes converted to subjective probabilities?" are not automatically dictated by the theory in the way that configuration spaces and lack of individual particle identities is dictated by the theory. So in this case, there is a legitimate question of what it is that you need to reshape your intuitions to regard as normal. If a QM interpretation seems weird, it may be that the interpretation in question is wrong and that you should not wrap your intuitions around it.

But what doesn't change, and this is the main point I was trying to make, is that you have to pick one or the other. If a theory seems bizarre to your intuitions, then either the theory is wrong or your intuitions need reshaping. Feynman felt he didn't understand QM, and lo and behold there was an additional insight required to make it seem normal. If Feynman thought that QM seemed bizarre and that this was okay, a state of affairs that didn't indicate a problem with either the theory or his intuitions, then that was historically incorrect - though I don't believe Feynman said as much in that many words.