I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing that. ie, I did, given certain assumptions, commit to SPECKS in my reply.
For the record, my current view is if the choice is between torture vs single speck event total per person for bignum people, I’d go with the SPECKS
I do not consider the situation as linear, however. ie, two dust specks for one person is not precisely twice as bad as a single dust speck in one person, nor is that exactly as bad as two people each experiencing a single dust speck. In fact, I’d suspect that it’d be reasonable to consider a single dust speck per person total has a finite disutility even in the limiting case of infinite people.
If the situation instead is “torture vs an additional dust speck per person for bignum people” then I’d want to know how many dust specks per person were already allocated, and as that number increased from 0, I’d probably lean a bit more toward TORTURE. But, of course, I know there’d have to be some value after which it’d really make no difference to add an additional dust speck or not, so back to SPECKS.
If I couldn’t obtain that information, then I’d at least want to know how many others are going to be asked this. ie, is this isolated, or are there going to be some number of people “tested” like this such that if all answered SPECKS, then the result would be effectively worse than the TORTURE option, then, well, if I knew how many would be asked, and how many saying yes it would take, and if I knew some statistical properties of their utility functions and so on, then effectively I’d choose randomly, but setting the probability for the choice such that the expected utility for the outcome under the assumption that everyone used that heuristic would be maximized. (This is assuming direct communication between all the askeees isn’t an option and so on. if it is, then that random heuristic wouldn’t be needed)
If even that option was disallowed, well, I’d have to estimate based on whatever distribution of possibilities for each of those things that represented my current (At the time) state of knowledge.
THIS is the point at which I get a bit stumped. If we say though “you have to make a decision, make it right now, even if it isn’t that great” I’m still going to go with SPECKS, though, admitedly, with far less confidence that it’s correct than what I said above.
Of course, now that I have a fallback last choice given no furthere knowledge/ability to consider, doing something about the whole situation that set up this issue would be something to investigate heavily. Also, I’d want to be developing a better model of exactly how to measure amount of effective suffering per “unit” suffering. I suspect it’d be some function of that plus how much it interferes with/overflows other possible states, etc etc etc.
As far as your overall point about people avoiding the decision, well, while it may be wise to avoid the habit of hiding from any uncomfortable decision, this is a bit different. I really can’t see asking for a bit more information in the context of an edge case that was constructed to prod at our normal decision making methods and that was asked as a hypothetical thought experiment, AND was a type of situation that I’d consider to be incredibly insanely mindexplodingly unlikely to pop up in Real Life(tm) any time soon as entirely unreasonable.
(chuckles on a meta level though, I just noticed that I seem to have chosen all possible options: commit to a specific choice, blabber about confusing aspects, ask for more information, and attempted to justify not commiting to a specific choice. There must be some sort of prize for this. :D)
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing that. ie, I did, given certain assumptions, commit to SPECKS in my reply.
For the record, my current view is if the choice is between torture vs single speck event total per person for bignum people, I’d go with the SPECKS
I do not consider the situation as linear, however. ie, two dust specks for one person is not precisely twice as bad as a single dust speck in one person, nor is that exactly as bad as two people each experiencing a single dust speck. In fact, I’d suspect that it’d be reasonable to consider a single dust speck per person total has a finite disutility even in the limiting case of infinite people.
If the situation instead is “torture vs an additional dust speck per person for bignum people” then I’d want to know how many dust specks per person were already allocated, and as that number increased from 0, I’d probably lean a bit more toward TORTURE. But, of course, I know there’d have to be some value after which it’d really make no difference to add an additional dust speck or not, so back to SPECKS.
If I couldn’t obtain that information, then I’d at least want to know how many others are going to be asked this. ie, is this isolated, or are there going to be some number of people “tested” like this such that if all answered SPECKS, then the result would be effectively worse than the TORTURE option, then, well, if I knew how many would be asked, and how many saying yes it would take, and if I knew some statistical properties of their utility functions and so on, then effectively I’d choose randomly, but setting the probability for the choice such that the expected utility for the outcome under the assumption that everyone used that heuristic would be maximized. (This is assuming direct communication between all the askeees isn’t an option and so on. if it is, then that random heuristic wouldn’t be needed)
If even that option was disallowed, well, I’d have to estimate based on whatever distribution of possibilities for each of those things that represented my current (At the time) state of knowledge.
THIS is the point at which I get a bit stumped. If we say though “you have to make a decision, make it right now, even if it isn’t that great” I’m still going to go with SPECKS, though, admitedly, with far less confidence that it’s correct than what I said above.
Of course, now that I have a fallback last choice given no furthere knowledge/ability to consider, doing something about the whole situation that set up this issue would be something to investigate heavily. Also, I’d want to be developing a better model of exactly how to measure amount of effective suffering per “unit” suffering. I suspect it’d be some function of that plus how much it interferes with/overflows other possible states, etc etc etc.
As far as your overall point about people avoiding the decision, well, while it may be wise to avoid the habit of hiding from any uncomfortable decision, this is a bit different. I really can’t see asking for a bit more information in the context of an edge case that was constructed to prod at our normal decision making methods and that was asked as a hypothetical thought experiment, AND was a type of situation that I’d consider to be incredibly insanely mindexplodingly unlikely to pop up in Real Life(tm) any time soon as entirely unreasonable.
(chuckles on a meta level though, I just noticed that I seem to have chosen all possible options: commit to a specific choice, blabber about confusing aspects, ask for more information, and attempted to justify not commiting to a specific choice. There must be some sort of prize for this. :D)