For what N would you say that {N specks better-than torture better-than N+1 specks}? If small quantities of utility or disutility have perfectly additive properties across groups of people, it should be simple to provide a concrete answer.
(Sidenote—there should be symbolic terminiology for better-than and worse-than. “>” and “<” would just be confusing in this context.)
That is interesting. But note that he was starting with a unit of 1 second of torture. 1 second of waterboarding is not 1/30th as distressing as 30 seconds of waterboarding. And 1 second of Chinese water torture, or the ice room, or simply isolation, is less disutility than dust speck. Actually, the particular case of isolation is one where the 50th year probably is worse than the first year, assuming the victim has not already gone completely bonkers by that point.
I don’t have a better idea. I really don’t have enough knowledge about how to torture people at extreme levels over a long period given the possibility of sufficiently advanced technology.
For what N would you say that {N specks better-than torture better-than N+1 specks}? If small quantities of utility or disutility have perfectly additive properties across groups of people, it should be simple to provide a concrete answer.
(Sidenote—there should be symbolic terminiology for better-than and worse-than. “>” and “<” would just be confusing in this context.)
I don’t know the precise utility values of torture vs. dust specks, but I would reason that...
Getting one dust speck is around a 1000x more preferable than being tortured for a second. There are 1,576,800,000 seconds in 50 years.
Thus, I place N roughly around 1,576,800,000,000.
Torture does not scale linearly with time. Indeed, I suspect even a simple exponential curve would understate the increase.
Wow. I thought you were going the other way with that one. The fiftieth year of torture is not nearly as damaging as the first.
That is interesting. But note that he was starting with a unit of 1 second of torture. 1 second of waterboarding is not 1/30th as distressing as 30 seconds of waterboarding. And 1 second of Chinese water torture, or the ice room, or simply isolation, is less disutility than dust speck. Actually, the particular case of isolation is one where the 50th year probably is worse than the first year, assuming the victim has not already gone completely bonkers by that point.
If you have been torturing someone for 49 years and they are not already completely bonkers then you are probably doing something wrong!
I agree with this, but I have no idea how to accurately discount it, so I decided to go linear and overestimate.
I don’t have a better idea. I really don’t have enough knowledge about how to torture people at extreme levels over a long period given the possibility of sufficiently advanced technology.