As a side note, I think belief in belief may relate. I’m willing to accept a world which is inconvenient, to a point. But the person who you are arguing with is acting extremely similarly to someone who has an invisible dragon in his garage.
No. Just no. A factual claim and a hypothetical thought-experiment are not the same thing. When you object to the details of the hypothetical thought experiment, and you nonetheless aren’t convinced by any modifications correcting it either, then you’re simply showing that this isn’t your true objection.
So many people seem to be trying to find ways to dance around the simple plain issue of whether we should consider the multiplication of small disutilities to possibly be morally equivalent (or worse) to a single humongous disutility.
On my part I say simply: YES. Torturing a person for 50 years is morally better than inflicting the momentary annoyance of a single dust speck to each of 3^^^3 people. I don’t see much sense in any arguments more complicated than a multiplication.
As simple and plain as that. People who’ve already written their bottom line differently, I am sure they can find whatever random excuses they want to explain it. But I just urge them to introspect for a sec and actually see whether that bottom line was actually affected any by the argument they placed above it.
So many people seem to be trying to find ways to dance around the simple plain issue of whether we should consider the multiplication of small disutilities to possibly be morally equivalent (or worse) to a single humongous disutility.
On my part I say simply: YES. Torturing a person for 50 years is morally better than inflicting the momentary annoyance of a single dust speck to each of 3^^^3 people. I don’t see much sense in any arguments more complicated than a multiplication.
I agree that this is the critical point, but you present this disagreement as if multiplying was the default approach, and the burden of proof fell entirely on any different evaluation method.
Myself, however, I’ve never heard a meaningful, persuasive argument in favour of naive utilitarian multiplication in the first place. I do believe that there is some humongous x_John above which it will be John’s rational preference to take a 1/x_John chance of torture rather than suffer a dust spek. But I do not believe that a dust speck in Alice’s eye is abstractly commensurable to a dust speck in Bob’s eye, or Alice’s torture to Bob’s torture, and a fortiori I also do not believe that 3^^^3 dust specks are commensurable to one random torture.
If John has to make a choice between the two (assuming he isn’t one of the affected people), he needs to consider the two possible worlds as a whole and decide which one he likes better, and he might have all sorts of reasons for favouring the dust speck world—for example, he might place some value on fairness.
I already came to that conclusion (Torture) when I posted on the October 7th in the previous thread. When I was thinking about the problem again on October 11th, I didn’t want to just repeat the exact same cached thoughts again, so I tried to think “Is there anything else about the problem I’m not thinking about?”
And then I thought “Oh look, concepts similarly to what other people mentioned on blog posts I’ve read. I’ll use THEIR cached thoughts. Aren’t I wise, parroting back the words of expert rationalists?” But that’s a horrible method of thinking that wont get me anywhere.
Furthermore, I ended my post with “I’m going to have to give this more thought.” Which is a stupid way to end a post. if it needs more thought, it needs more thought, so why did I post it?
So actually, I agree with your down vote. In retrospect, there are several reasons why that is actually a bad post, even though it seemed to make sense at the time.
Either way I’ll retract it but not blank it: Checking on other threads seems to indicate that blanking is inappropriate because it leaves some people wondering what was said, but it should be retracted.
No. Just no. A factual claim and a hypothetical thought-experiment are not the same thing. When you object to the details of the hypothetical thought experiment, and you nonetheless aren’t convinced by any modifications correcting it either, then you’re simply showing that this isn’t your true objection.
So many people seem to be trying to find ways to dance around the simple plain issue of whether we should consider the multiplication of small disutilities to possibly be morally equivalent (or worse) to a single humongous disutility.
On my part I say simply: YES. Torturing a person for 50 years is morally better than inflicting the momentary annoyance of a single dust speck to each of 3^^^3 people. I don’t see much sense in any arguments more complicated than a multiplication.
As simple and plain as that. People who’ve already written their bottom line differently, I am sure they can find whatever random excuses they want to explain it. But I just urge them to introspect for a sec and actually see whether that bottom line was actually affected any by the argument they placed above it.
I agree that this is the critical point, but you present this disagreement as if multiplying was the default approach, and the burden of proof fell entirely on any different evaluation method.
Myself, however, I’ve never heard a meaningful, persuasive argument in favour of naive utilitarian multiplication in the first place. I do believe that there is some humongous x_John above which it will be John’s rational preference to take a 1/x_John chance of torture rather than suffer a dust spek. But I do not believe that a dust speck in Alice’s eye is abstractly commensurable to a dust speck in Bob’s eye, or Alice’s torture to Bob’s torture, and a fortiori I also do not believe that 3^^^3 dust specks are commensurable to one random torture.
If John has to make a choice between the two (assuming he isn’t one of the affected people), he needs to consider the two possible worlds as a whole and decide which one he likes better, and he might have all sorts of reasons for favouring the dust speck world—for example, he might place some value on fairness.
I already came to that conclusion (Torture) when I posted on the October 7th in the previous thread. When I was thinking about the problem again on October 11th, I didn’t want to just repeat the exact same cached thoughts again, so I tried to think “Is there anything else about the problem I’m not thinking about?”
And then I thought “Oh look, concepts similarly to what other people mentioned on blog posts I’ve read. I’ll use THEIR cached thoughts. Aren’t I wise, parroting back the words of expert rationalists?” But that’s a horrible method of thinking that wont get me anywhere.
Furthermore, I ended my post with “I’m going to have to give this more thought.” Which is a stupid way to end a post. if it needs more thought, it needs more thought, so why did I post it?
So actually, I agree with your down vote. In retrospect, there are several reasons why that is actually a bad post, even though it seemed to make sense at the time.
For clarity: I didn’t downvote you.
Thank you for the clarification about that.
Either way I’ll retract it but not blank it: Checking on other threads seems to indicate that blanking is inappropriate because it leaves some people wondering what was said, but it should be retracted.