Something clicked for me as I planned Christmas travel.
I find long distance air travel unpleasant. I’ve spent the money that can be spent improving it but it’s still just pretty bad. I get through it with a healthy dose of dissociation. This works fine under the current system, but it means I will lose contests of suffering because I’ve cut off knowledge of the suffering from my forebrain. Just the request to register my pain levels increases my experience of pain. If the deal is that I have to be completely in touch with the pain and empathetic to others’ pain and be socially graceful to everyone while I’m explaining that pain (because if I’m rude I’ll lose no matter what my pain level) while simultaneously being convincingly hurt and do math about who is actually suffering more, knowing that both people are incentivized to play their suffering up? But if I opt out of the game then I get to hurt a bunch more and recovering will take longer and maybe the other guy wasn’t even suffering that much, which is why he was having such an easy time talking about it? And whether I win or lose, I’m going to have a much worse flight because the dissociation spell is broken.
I would honestly rather you handed us both a knife and declare whoever cut themselves deeper the winner.
I’m probably at the strong end of this preference, but I do think a weaker version of “being asked to register your own pain levels and compare with someone else’s is itself a cost” applies to many people, and the utilitarian math needs to take that into account when deciding between suffering contest and property rights based solutions.
Something clicked for me as I planned Christmas travel.
I find long distance air travel unpleasant. I’ve spent the money that can be spent improving it but it’s still just pretty bad. I get through it with a healthy dose of dissociation. This works fine under the current system, but it means I will lose contests of suffering because I’ve cut off knowledge of the suffering from my forebrain. Just the request to register my pain levels increases my experience of pain. If the deal is that I have to be completely in touch with the pain and empathetic to others’ pain and be socially graceful to everyone while I’m explaining that pain (because if I’m rude I’ll lose no matter what my pain level) while simultaneously being convincingly hurt and do math about who is actually suffering more, knowing that both people are incentivized to play their suffering up? But if I opt out of the game then I get to hurt a bunch more and recovering will take longer and maybe the other guy wasn’t even suffering that much, which is why he was having such an easy time talking about it? And whether I win or lose, I’m going to have a much worse flight because the dissociation spell is broken.
I would honestly rather you handed us both a knife and declare whoever cut themselves deeper the winner.
I’m probably at the strong end of this preference, but I do think a weaker version of “being asked to register your own pain levels and compare with someone else’s is itself a cost” applies to many people, and the utilitarian math needs to take that into account when deciding between suffering contest and property rights based solutions.