Inquire about the subjective vs objective duration of that millisecond. If there aren’t any bad surprises there, pick torture before my mind can try to make a guess of how bad it will hurt.
In the torture vs dust specks I choose dust specks if they weren’t allowed to cause ripple effect and if they were guaranteed to be spread with only 1 dust speck for humans. Here there is a similar consideration, how the pain is spread in a time interval so small that it will basically be inconsequential (since he guaranteed that I won’t suffer lasting consequences, I’d fully expect such a pain to fry my brain and have it possibly melt out of my eyes or something).
I’m basically choosing to screw over the future myself of that millisecond to protect all the other future self.
Both decisions should work fine as long as I’m not approached by a large number of Pascal’s muggers, if it risks becoming a trend I should review my decision theory.
For another human… I’d choose torture for the same considerations, if he choose torture I wouldn’t override it, I’d have emotional qualms about overriding his “death” decision, but I likely will.
The math of pain vs pleasure of being alive would likely say my decisions are wrong, but I think the math starts to stop helping in this limit cases, picking death strikes me as a two boxing with Omega (though I think the math there shows you are right went one boxing if you manage to take in the backward causal link). You’ll be pretty glad you choose torture exactly one millisecond after and for the rest of your live, and so will the stranger (unless he was suicidal, but it doesn’t seem I’m allowed to know it before picking).
Inquire about the subjective vs objective duration of that millisecond. If there aren’t any bad surprises there, pick torture before my mind can try to make a guess of how bad it will hurt.
In the torture vs dust specks I choose dust specks if they weren’t allowed to cause ripple effect and if they were guaranteed to be spread with only 1 dust speck for humans. Here there is a similar consideration, how the pain is spread in a time interval so small that it will basically be inconsequential (since he guaranteed that I won’t suffer lasting consequences, I’d fully expect such a pain to fry my brain and have it possibly melt out of my eyes or something).
I’m basically choosing to screw over the future myself of that millisecond to protect all the other future self.
Both decisions should work fine as long as I’m not approached by a large number of Pascal’s muggers, if it risks becoming a trend I should review my decision theory.
For another human… I’d choose torture for the same considerations, if he choose torture I wouldn’t override it, I’d have emotional qualms about overriding his “death” decision, but I likely will.
The math of pain vs pleasure of being alive would likely say my decisions are wrong, but I think the math starts to stop helping in this limit cases, picking death strikes me as a two boxing with Omega (though I think the math there shows you are right went one boxing if you manage to take in the backward causal link). You’ll be pretty glad you choose torture exactly one millisecond after and for the rest of your live, and so will the stranger (unless he was suicidal, but it doesn’t seem I’m allowed to know it before picking).