I should begin by saying that I caught myself writing my conclusion as the first sentence of this post, and then doing the math. I’m doing the calculations entirely in terms of the victim’s time, which is quantifiable.
Dust specks would take up a much smaller portion of the victims’ lifes (say, a generous 9 seconds of blinking out of 2483583120 seconds of life expectancy (78.7 years) per person), whereas torture would take up a whole fifty years of a single person’s life.
All of my math came crashing down when I realized that 3^^^3 is a bigger number than my brain can really handle. Scope insensitivity makes me want to choose the dust.
Would anyone really care about the dust, though? I mean, 9/2483583120 is a fairly small number, all things considered.
The law of large numbers says yes. If there is an infinitesimal chance of someone, say, getting into a lethal car accident because of a dust speck in their eye, then it will happen a whole bunch of times and people will die. If the dust could cause an infection and blind someone, it will happen a whole bunch of times. That would be worse than one persons torture.
But if the conditions are such that none of that will happen to the people—they are brought into a controlled environment at at a convenient time and given sterile dust specks (if you are capable of putting dust in so many people’s eyes at will, then you are probably powerful enough to do anything)--then no individual person would really care about it. A dust fleck simply doesn’t hurt as badly a torture. Every single person would just forget about it.
So, if you mean “a dust fleck’s worth of discomfort”, then I choose the dust. If you mean dust specks in people’s eyes, then I choose the torture.
I should begin by saying that I caught myself writing my conclusion as the first sentence of this post, and then doing the math. I’m doing the calculations entirely in terms of the victim’s time, which is quantifiable.
Dust specks would take up a much smaller portion of the victims’ lifes (say, a generous 9 seconds of blinking out of 2483583120 seconds of life expectancy (78.7 years) per person), whereas torture would take up a whole fifty years of a single person’s life.
All of my math came crashing down when I realized that 3^^^3 is a bigger number than my brain can really handle. Scope insensitivity makes me want to choose the dust.
Would anyone really care about the dust, though? I mean, 9/2483583120 is a fairly small number, all things considered.
The law of large numbers says yes. If there is an infinitesimal chance of someone, say, getting into a lethal car accident because of a dust speck in their eye, then it will happen a whole bunch of times and people will die. If the dust could cause an infection and blind someone, it will happen a whole bunch of times. That would be worse than one persons torture.
But if the conditions are such that none of that will happen to the people—they are brought into a controlled environment at at a convenient time and given sterile dust specks (if you are capable of putting dust in so many people’s eyes at will, then you are probably powerful enough to do anything)--then no individual person would really care about it. A dust fleck simply doesn’t hurt as badly a torture. Every single person would just forget about it.
So, if you mean “a dust fleck’s worth of discomfort”, then I choose the dust. If you mean dust specks in people’s eyes, then I choose the torture.
“World Development Indicators | Data.” Data | The World Bank. The World Bank Group, 2011. Web. 23 Aug. 2011. http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators?cid=GPD_WDI.