So you would be willing to keep sending more and more people to torture for trivial less discomfort for the majority for each person tortured. At what point would you say enough is enough?
Don’t be bamboozled by big numbers, it is exactly the same problem: How far would you go to maximize pain in the minority in order to minimize it in the majority. As Eliezer argued so forcefully in the comments above, this problem exists on a continuum and if you want to break the chain at any point you have to justify why that point and not another.
Your argument for 1:1,000,000 does not go far enough in minimising pain for the majority. One person cannot take the pain of 1,000,000 people without dying or at least becoming unconscious. I suspect the ma...
OK, so you would accept less than one person per universe to be tortured for 50 years for everyone to avoid occasional mild discomfort. But that doesn’t answer the question of how far you are willing to take this logic. We haven’t even began to touch serious discomfort like half the population getting menstrual cramps every month, let alone prolonged pain and suffering. Would you send one person per planet for torture? One person per city? One person per family?
The end result of this game is that a significant minority of people are being tortured at any one time so the majority can live lives free of discomfort, pain and suffering. So is your acceptable ratio 1:1,000,000, 1:10?
I have been reading less wrong about 6 month but this is my first post. I'm not an expert but an interested amateur. I read this post about 3 weeks ago and thought it was a joke. After working through replies and following links, I get it is a serious question with serious consequences in the world today. I don’t think my comments duplicate others already in the thread so here goes…
Let’s call this a “one blink” discomfort (it comes and goes in a blink) and let’s say that on average each person gets one every 10 minutes during their waking hours. In re...
Some people thrive for decades (including Stephen Hawking) tube fed with nutritionally complete enteral formulas. Semi-annual blood tests pick up any deficiencies, and supplements are added if needed. Several companies make "Soylent", the one I am familiar with is Abbott Nutrition.
If there's something there that isn't priced for sale to hospitals, or restricted in sale to hospitals, and has been formulated so as to be edible by people who are tired of real food, go ahead and post it. My understanding is that tube-feeding is not the same use-case as Soylent at all, with tube-fed material needing to be essentially predigested and correspondingly expensive or something along those lines, and no concern for edible taste for obvious reasons.
I've done some looking, but I haven't seen anything out there that looks like it's meant to be eaten, meant to replace food, and priced at an affordable level for sole consumption.