Correction:
What I said: “one-second of irritation is less than 3^^^3-times as bad as the 50 years of torture.”
What I meant: “50 years of torture is more than 3^^^3-times as bad as 1-second of eye-irritation.”
Apologies for the mis-type (as well as for saying “you’re” when I meant “your”).
But the point is, if there are no additional consequences to the suffering, then it’s irrelevant. I don’t care how many people experience the 1-second of suffering. There is no number large enough to make it matter.
Eliezer had a good point. It works if we’re considering lives saved. It doesn’t work with dust-specks and torture. It’s not because torture is a taboo that only hard-headed rationalists are able to consider with a clear-mind. It’s because something that’s non-consequential is non-consequential, even when you multiply it by unimaginably large numbers. But we can’t imagine torture and 50 years of lost time as being non-consequential for good reason. The example was bad. We should move on to more productive endeavors.
Correction: What I said: “one-second of irritation is less than 3^^^3-times as bad as the 50 years of torture.” What I meant: “50 years of torture is more than 3^^^3-times as bad as 1-second of eye-irritation.” Apologies for the mis-type (as well as for saying “you’re” when I meant “your”).
But the point is, if there are no additional consequences to the suffering, then it’s irrelevant. I don’t care how many people experience the 1-second of suffering. There is no number large enough to make it matter.
Eliezer had a good point. It works if we’re considering lives saved. It doesn’t work with dust-specks and torture. It’s not because torture is a taboo that only hard-headed rationalists are able to consider with a clear-mind. It’s because something that’s non-consequential is non-consequential, even when you multiply it by unimaginably large numbers. But we can’t imagine torture and 50 years of lost time as being non-consequential for good reason. The example was bad. We should move on to more productive endeavors.