The comments on this post are no better than those on the Torture vs. Dust Specks post. In other words, simply bring the word “torture” into the discussion and people automatically become irrational. It’s happened to some of the other threads as well, when someone mentioned torture.
It strongly suggests that not many of the readers have made much progress in overcoming their biases.
By the way, Eliezer has corrected the original post; anonymous was correct about the numbers.
I’m not disputing the validity of the thought process. I don’t think the example was well chosen, however. A dust speck, ignoring externalities, doesn’t affect anything. Using even a pinprick would have made the example far better.
It’s an extremely hypothetical situation. However, why should it, ignoring externalities as the problem required, be measured at any disutility? That dust speck has no impact on my life in any way, other than making me blink. No pain is involved.
The comments on this post are no better than those on the Torture vs. Dust Specks post. In other words, simply bring the word “torture” into the discussion and people automatically become irrational. It’s happened to some of the other threads as well, when someone mentioned torture.
It strongly suggests that not many of the readers have made much progress in overcoming their biases.
By the way, Eliezer has corrected the original post; anonymous was correct about the numbers.
I would simply argue that a dust speck has 0 disutility.
Pick some other inconvenience which has a small but non-zero disutility and repeat the exercise.
I’m not disputing the validity of the thought process. I don’t think the example was well chosen, however. A dust speck, ignoring externalities, doesn’t affect anything. Using even a pinprick would have made the example far better.
That’d be Fighting the Hypothetical.
It’s an extremely hypothetical situation. However, why should it, ignoring externalities as the problem required, be measured at any disutility? That dust speck has no impact on my life in any way, other than making me blink. No pain is involved.
Because it’s one of the parameters of the thought experiment that a dust speck causes a miniscule amount of disutility.