Eliezer’s solution to Torture vs. Dust relied on the assumptions that dust is at least somewhat bad and torture is clearly bad, and the reasoning that 3^^^3 is so big that if we choose to consider some aggregation of the dust speck negative utilities, 3^^^3 will outweigh any reasonable discounting of aggregation.
Now, I read in the OP that the Youtube existence is assumed to be zero value. I could go on actually imagining it and trying to assign some value to it on a gut level. However, people differ in their notions of “zero value”, “a tiny bit good” and “a tiny bit bad” scenarios, unlike in the case of torture, which is unanimously believed very bad, and probably also unlike in the case of Sublimity.
I think a great part of the debate on Torture vs. Dust stemmed from uncertain value calculus of utilities very close to zero. The way Sublimity vs. Youtube is presented, I think it is going to head in the same direction. However, if I blank out the specifics, mentioning only that the first type of existence is value-zero and the second is definitely good, the problem gets reduced to 3^^^3*0 < any positive number.
Nevertheless it may not be a bad thing to debate and communicate our notions of close-to-zero value scenarios.
Eliezer’s solution to Torture vs. Dust relied on the assumptions that dust is at least somewhat bad and torture is clearly bad, and the reasoning that 3^^^3 is so big that if we choose to consider some aggregation of the dust speck negative utilities, 3^^^3 will outweigh any reasonable discounting of aggregation.
Now, I read in the OP that the Youtube existence is assumed to be zero value. I could go on actually imagining it and trying to assign some value to it on a gut level. However, people differ in their notions of “zero value”, “a tiny bit good” and “a tiny bit bad” scenarios, unlike in the case of torture, which is unanimously believed very bad, and probably also unlike in the case of Sublimity.
I think a great part of the debate on Torture vs. Dust stemmed from uncertain value calculus of utilities very close to zero. The way Sublimity vs. Youtube is presented, I think it is going to head in the same direction. However, if I blank out the specifics, mentioning only that the first type of existence is value-zero and the second is definitely good, the problem gets reduced to 3^^^3*0 < any positive number.
Nevertheless it may not be a bad thing to debate and communicate our notions of close-to-zero value scenarios.