I’m not sure I understand at what point the torture would no longer be justified. It’s easy to say that it is preferable to a googolplex of people with dust specks is worse than one person being tortured, but there has to be some number at which this is no longer the case. At some point even your preferences should flip, but you never suggest a point where it would be acceptable. Would it be somewhere around 1.5-1.6 billion, assuming the dust specks were worth 1 second of pain? Is it acceptable if it is just 2 people affected? How many dust specks go into 1 year of torture? I think people would be more comfortable with your conclusion if you had some way to quantify it; right now all we have is your assertion that the math is in the dust speck’s favor.
As I understand it, the math is in the dust speck’s favor because EY used an arbitrarily large number such that it couldn’t possibly be otherwise.
I think a better comparison would be between 1 second of torture (which I’d estimate is worth multiple dust specks, assuming it’s not hard to get them out of your eye) and 50 years of torture, in which case yes, it would flip around 1.5 billion. That is of course assuming that you don’t have a term in your utility function where sharing of burdens is valuable- I assume EY would be fine with that but would insist that you implement it in the intermediate calculations as well.
I’m not sure I understand at what point the torture would no longer be justified. It’s easy to say that it is preferable to a googolplex of people with dust specks is worse than one person being tortured, but there has to be some number at which this is no longer the case. At some point even your preferences should flip, but you never suggest a point where it would be acceptable. Would it be somewhere around 1.5-1.6 billion, assuming the dust specks were worth 1 second of pain? Is it acceptable if it is just 2 people affected? How many dust specks go into 1 year of torture? I think people would be more comfortable with your conclusion if you had some way to quantify it; right now all we have is your assertion that the math is in the dust speck’s favor.
As I understand it, the math is in the dust speck’s favor because EY used an arbitrarily large number such that it couldn’t possibly be otherwise.
I think a better comparison would be between 1 second of torture (which I’d estimate is worth multiple dust specks, assuming it’s not hard to get them out of your eye) and 50 years of torture, in which case yes, it would flip around 1.5 billion. That is of course assuming that you don’t have a term in your utility function where sharing of burdens is valuable- I assume EY would be fine with that but would insist that you implement it in the intermediate calculations as well.