There are some people who think punishment and reward work linearly.
If I remember correctly (please correct me if I’m wrong) even Eliezer himself believes that if we assign a pain value in the single digits to very slightly pinching someone so they barely feel anything, and a pain value in the millions to torturing someone with the worst possible torture, then you should choose torturing a thousand people over slightly pinching half of the planet’s inhabitants, if your goal was to minimize suffering. With such a logic, you could assign rewards and punishments to anything, and calculate pretty strange things out of that.
There are some people who think punishment and reward work linearly.
If I remember correctly (please correct me if I’m wrong) even Eliezer himself believes that if we assign a pain value in the single digits to very slightly pinching someone so they barely feel anything, and a pain value in the millions to torturing someone with the worst possible torture, then you should choose torturing a thousand people over slightly pinching half of the planet’s inhabitants, if your goal was to minimize suffering. With such a logic, you could assign rewards and punishments to anything, and calculate pretty strange things out of that.