This thought experiment is unrealistic, there is no and will never be a population of 3^^^3 homogenous agents to consider. In common realistic variants the considerations end up dominated by considerations like “who is being tortured?” and “what do the dust specks interfere with?”.
Hypothetical question for you: what if there is a sequence of wrong mental turns that leads towards a psychological attractor state that’s bad, and accepting the hypothetical in the OP is one of these turns?
This thought experiment is unrealistic, there is no and will never be a population of 3^^^3 homogenous agents to consider. In common realistic variants the considerations end up dominated by considerations like “who is being tortured?” and “what do the dust specks interfere with?”.
many such cases
They’re not intended to be realistic, but as a way of disentangling different intuitions.
This perspective is captured here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s9hTXtAPn2ZEAWutr/please-don-t-fight-the-hypothetical
Where you shouldn’t try to fight the hypothetical’s assumptions, but instead actually answer the question.
Hypothetical question for you: what if there is a sequence of wrong mental turns that leads towards a psychological attractor state that’s bad, and accepting the hypothetical in the OP is one of these turns?
Then you shouldn’t accept the hypothetical.
I didn’t mean for this to be a claim that you must accept all hypotheticals.