Eliezer, a problem seems to be that the speck does not serve the function you want it to in this example, at least not for all readers. In this case, many people see a special penny because there is some threshold value below which the least bad bad thing is not really bad. The speck is intended to be an example of the least bad bad thing, but we give it a badness rating of one minus .9-repeating.
(This seems to happen to a lot of arguments. “Take x, which is y.” Well, no, x is not quite y, so the argument breaks down and the discussion follows some tangent. The Distributed Republic had a good post on this, but I cannot find it.)
We have a special penny because there is some amount of eye dust that becomes noticeable and could genuinely qualify as the least bad bad thing. If everyone on Earth gets this decision at once, and everyone suddenly gets >6,000,000,000 specks, that might be enough to crush all our skulls (how much does a speck weigh?). Somewhere between that and “one speck, one blink, ever” is a special penny.
If we can just stipulate “the smallest unit of suffering (or negative qualia, or your favorite term),” then we can move on to the more interesting parts of the discussion.
I also see a qualitative difference if there can be secondary effects or summation causes secondary effects. As noted above, if 3^^^3/10^20 people die due to freakishly unlikely accidents caused by blinking, the choice becomes trivial. Similarly, +0.000001C sums somewhat differently than specks. 1 speck/day/person for 3^^^3 days is still not an existential risk; 3^^^3 specks at once will kill everyone.
Eliezer, a problem seems to be that the speck does not serve the function you want it to in this example, at least not for all readers. In this case, many people see a special penny because there is some threshold value below which the least bad bad thing is not really bad. The speck is intended to be an example of the least bad bad thing, but we give it a badness rating of one minus .9-repeating.
(This seems to happen to a lot of arguments. “Take x, which is y.” Well, no, x is not quite y, so the argument breaks down and the discussion follows some tangent. The Distributed Republic had a good post on this, but I cannot find it.)
We have a special penny because there is some amount of eye dust that becomes noticeable and could genuinely qualify as the least bad bad thing. If everyone on Earth gets this decision at once, and everyone suddenly gets >6,000,000,000 specks, that might be enough to crush all our skulls (how much does a speck weigh?). Somewhere between that and “one speck, one blink, ever” is a special penny.
If we can just stipulate “the smallest unit of suffering (or negative qualia, or your favorite term),” then we can move on to the more interesting parts of the discussion.
I also see a qualitative difference if there can be secondary effects or summation causes secondary effects. As noted above, if 3^^^3/10^20 people die due to freakishly unlikely accidents caused by blinking, the choice becomes trivial. Similarly, +0.000001C sums somewhat differently than specks. 1 speck/day/person for 3^^^3 days is still not an existential risk; 3^^^3 specks at once will kill everyone.
(I still say Kyle wins.)