5 ms·

So annoying 3^^^3 people "for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make them notice" is worse than horribly torturing a single person for 50 years? Keep in

• maaku 12y ago
  > and their annoyance can't be simply added together Why not? EDIT: Serious question. If I save two lives that is twice as good as saving one, right? Why is this situation different?
  • id 12y ago
    It's easier for two people to cope with one bad experience each than for one guy to cope with two bad experiences.
    • maaku 12y ago
      Assumed independence. You are talking about a strictly different setup. Assume that these individuals don't know each other.
      • shawnz 12y ago
        I don't think he is making the assumption that they know each other. Each individual has a tolerance of what they can comfortably cope with. If 3^^^3 people were all experiencing a pain that is below that tolerance, nobody would be prevented from happiness. However in the other situation, the tortured individual clearly would be.
        • maaku 12y ago
          That's an example of infinite or unbounded utility functions: no matter how many specks of dust in the eye, it will never add up to a single person being tortured for 50 years. Even 3^^^^^^^^^^^3 specks of dust. Unfortunately the mathematics of infinite and/or unbounded utility functions doesn't work out well. It leads to some seriously messed up edge cases. (So does finite utilitariansm, to be fair -- [Pascal's mugging](http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/pascal.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/pascal.pdf) -- but these are fully dealt with by decision theory, whereas the infinite or unbounded cases are not). It's not very strong, but it is evidence that we should be accepting of the calculations of finite utilitarianism since the formalization works out better in cases which are within the realm of our experience.
      • walterbell 12y ago
        Talk to an urban planner or someone working in disaster relief. Empathic "strangers" help others, in many contexts, often at personal risk. That's what separates humans from singularitarian quantum computing devices.
    • twobits 12y ago
      I'd say if each of those two people had the "bad experience" of having their only child killed in a car accident, that's worse than someone else having his uncle and grandmother killed in a car accident. "Bad experience" is hugely oversimplified. And just not start about a trillion specs of dust in a trillion people.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • angersock 12y ago
    To quote Heinlen: "Men are not potatoes."
  • randallsquared 12y ago
    It depends on how you measure "good". :/ Most people measure goodness and badness by how they feel about it, and for anyone who feels a significant amount of badness (grief, anger, whatever) at the death of a single person, it is physiologically impossible for them to feel a million times worse about the death of a million people. It's intuitively obvious to most people, therefore, that suffering, annoyance, life-saving, and so on, are not additive: they just have to check how they feel about the situation to know that. In order to suggest that they are additive, and that N "people annoyed" can outweigh M "people suffering", you have to first convince someone that how their own internal measurement of goodness (how they feel about it) is not as accurate as some external measurement.
    • maaku 12y ago
      It's analogous to saying that "most people believe the world is flat. the burden is really on you to show that the world is really round." Which is true. But requires a willingness to counter one's own intuition when encountering contradictory evidence. Unfortunately the type of person that does that is uncommon.
      • randallsquared 12y ago
        I don't disagree with what you actually said, but your choice of analogy suggests that you believe that questions of morality are settled and have obvious, objective answers.
        • maaku 12y ago
          In some cases, yes. If you accept utilitarianism as the the reductive explanation of morality, and assume some non-controversial terminal values, then all of morality is reduced to straight-forward calculations. "The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right." -Leibniz Unfortunately we retain some ignorance on the correct nature of utility functions (finite? time-preference adjusted? etc.), and terminal values for humans are demonstrably arbitrary.
  • twobits 12y ago
    Because at the end of the day, no one gives a fuck about a spec of sand in their eyes. Having your balls ripped off, might be different. YMMV. Human feeling is a bit more complicated than just adding.
  • twobits 12y ago
    To put it differently, since we are rationalists, try the scientific way. Do an experiment. First day, let a speck of dust enter your eye, at noon. Before sleeping, write down how you feel about that event. Next day, rip your balls off at noon. Before sleeping, write down how you feel about that.
    • maaku 12y ago
      Let me know how it goes.
• xyzzyz 12y ago
  What's the probability that having speck in the eye at any given time has some terrible consequences (like, for instance, causing traffic accident, or making a mistake when doing a brain surgery)? If we assume that on the whole Earth, at any time there's at least one person who would suffer greatly from speck in the eye, the probability is at least 1/8e9. Now notice that 1/8e9 of 3^^^3 is more people than have ever lived.
  • id 12y ago
    I assumed there to be no side effects to the dust specks. Otherwise millions would die in accidents and the thought experiment wouldn't make much sense.
• dllthomas 12y ago
  It doesn't assume that we can simply add their annoyance together. It assumes that, whatever function computes the badness of some badness applied to multiple people, it diverges and does so fast enough (where "fast enough" will probably include "exceptionally slowly", but in principle there are sufficiently slow divergent functions). I don't think this is well enough established, though it seems plausible.
  • mansr 12y ago
    I'm inclined to think that there is some threshold below which that function is constant. "Dust in eye" is definitely below this threshold.
    • dllthomas 12y ago
      I think that's illusory, at best. Does time play a role? If not, this would lead to "Someone has ever got a dust speck in their eye. It is now no longer a bad thing when someone else gets a dust speck in their eye." Which seems absurd. In fact, given that we live in a universe where someone has ever got a dust speck in their eye, it would mean that getting a dust speck in one's eye is no longer the "least bad bad thing" that could happen, which violates the assumption of the thought experiment and you should substitute something more severe. If time does play a role, you can spread out the 3^^^3 dust specks. (Obviously, we don't realistically have enough time, but then we don't realistically have enough space either).