Recovering: chuckles no, I meant thinking about that, and rethinking about what the actual properties of what I’d consider to be a reasonable utility function led me to reject my earlier claim of the specific nonlinearity that lead to my assumption that as you increase the number of people that recieve a spec, the disutility is sublinear, and now I believe it to be linear. So huge bigbigbigbiggigantaenormous num specks would, of course, eventually have to have more disutility than the torture. But since to get to that point knuth arrow notation had to be invoked, I don’t think there’s any worry that I’m off to get my “rack winding certificate” :P
But yeah, out of context this debate would sound like complete nonsense… “crazy geeks find it difficult to decide between dust specks and extreme torture.”
I do have to admit though, Andrew’s comment about individual living 3^^^3 times and so on has me thinking again. If “keep memories and so on of all previous lives = yes” (so it’s really one really long lifespan) and “permanent physical and psychological damage post torture = no”) then I may take that. I think. Arrrgh, stop messing with my head. Actually, no, don’t stop, this is fun! :)
Recovering: chuckles no, I meant thinking about that, and rethinking about what the actual properties of what I’d consider to be a reasonable utility function led me to reject my earlier claim of the specific nonlinearity that lead to my assumption that as you increase the number of people that recieve a spec, the disutility is sublinear, and now I believe it to be linear. So huge bigbigbigbiggigantaenormous num specks would, of course, eventually have to have more disutility than the torture. But since to get to that point knuth arrow notation had to be invoked, I don’t think there’s any worry that I’m off to get my “rack winding certificate” :P
But yeah, out of context this debate would sound like complete nonsense… “crazy geeks find it difficult to decide between dust specks and extreme torture.”
I do have to admit though, Andrew’s comment about individual living 3^^^3 times and so on has me thinking again. If “keep memories and so on of all previous lives = yes” (so it’s really one really long lifespan) and “permanent physical and psychological damage post torture = no”) then I may take that. I think. Arrrgh, stop messing with my head. Actually, no, don’t stop, this is fun! :)