[kybernetikos]

The size of the numbers is irrelevant. I personally would consider a world in which I had no mote of dust and someone else was tortured as a world with less utility than a world in which I had a mote of dust in my eye. I expect every single one of those 3||3 individuals to feel the same way. Therefore, there is no number of individuals that I would choose not to suffer the dust mote in preference to torturing someone.

The answer to the argument from circularity is obvious - there is a discontinuity. I can see the discontinuity in my own thinking, and you probably can too. I would accept a dust mote to save an individual from years of torture (and I think almost all reasonable people would), but I would not accept a dust mote to save two people from a dust mote. That may be unethical of me, since I would of course prefer the world that has fewer people with dust motes, but for me to expect the greater number of people to make the sacrifice, I must be prepared to make the sacrifice myself and it must be a sacrifice that I think all people should make. Exactly how much I think people should sacrifice for others is difficult to say, but there is a clear step change at some point.

[ikeboy]

I don't see how that's relevant to answering the circularity argument. How are you avoiding the claim that your preferences are inconsistent? At some point, you need to accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, where the decrease can be pretty much arbitrarily small and the jump can be arbitrarily large.

(Also, if you click on the comment you can reply).

[kybernetikos]

There's a difference between the utility of a world where one person has a mote of dust in their eye and the utility of a world where one person has a mote of dust in their eye because it saves someone else.

>At some point, you need to accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, where the decrease can be pretty much arbitrarily small and the jump can be arbitrarily large.

Well, the boundary is fuzzy, so I believe that different people will draw the line in different places, but yes, that is correct. There is a point at which I accept a huge jump in the number of people getting hurt in return for a tiny decrease in the amount of hurt for each one, and that point is the point at which I determine that the hurt falls under the threshold I would expect every person to be prepared to sacrifice for any other person.

I think the debatable range is actually quite large, so the tiny decrease part might not be fair (there are a lot of degrees of pain I would not demand someone to suffer to save others), but at that point of expected sacrifice, the number of people jumps to infinite.

[zyxley]

> and that point is the point at which I determine that the hurt falls under the threshold I would expect every person to be prepared to sacrifice for any other person.

That seems like a good way to put it.

The number of people doesn't really matter, when it the amount of hurt per person is so small that you can say with all confidence something like "I believe that literally any sane person would agree to get one speck in their eye to save a stranger from fifty years of torture".

[ikeboy]

So first of all, your preferences are still circular, unless you bite another bullet somewhere. But even your argument isn't quite accurate. It's not this one person who needs to get a speck, it's a literally unimaginable amount of people.

As it happens to be, a number of people in our tiny world have said they would choose torture, so your argument fails just considering them.

[kybernetikos]

> But even your argument isn't quite accurate. It's not this one person who needs to get a speck, it's a literally unimaginable amount of people.

Nearly all of whom prefer to receive the speck than to allow the individual to be tortured.

> As it happens to be, a number of people in our tiny world have said they would choose torture, so your argument fails just considering them.

Yes, I feel somewhat uncomfortable ignoring the agency of torturers and murderers in this scenario, and that reluctance would play into a very conservative estimate of where that threshold should be, but I would be reluctant to choose a lowest common denominator measure to establish morality.

[ikeboy]

So your intuition says that there's some point where everyone is suffering pain X, where X is very large, and they would each agree to cause the X-(1 mote speck) to a trillion times as many people, in return for reducing their own suffering by 1 mote speck? That strikes me as beyond regular selfishness, and non intuitive.

[kybernetikos]

Can you explain more clearly why what I said implies that, because I don't think I mean to say that.

I believe that there is an amount of suffering that it is reasonable to expect anyone to accept in order to help another person. That amount depends on the amount to be suffered, and the amount benefited by the recipient. Once the suffering falls under that threshold, I do not believe the number of people required to make the sacrifice comes into consideration, as each of them if reasonable would say "I prefer to belong to this world, where as part of a huge group I accept this small ill in order that someone else benefits". Therefore, the implied sacrifice results in greater utility for that choice.

Let me try a different tack.

Let's say that you observe a universe with some large number of people suffering dust specks in their eye. That sounds bad. But what if every single one of those people actually suffering thinks that this universe is better than the alternatives. You don't suffer from a dust spec, but are you going to ignore all those people in their estimation of the utility of the universe? If you switched to a universe where all of those people didn't suffer from dust specs, but someone else was suffering, they would tell you that that was a worse universe.

It's pretty obvious to me that even if that isn't the exact case, it's close to being the case in reality - that's why people find the dust speck argument to be unintuitive, not the large numbers thing. It's because some measure of sacrifice for other people is part of what we expect from everyone, and most people know instinctively that if everyone asked to make a sacrifice agrees that it's right to make that sacrifice, then the world is better because of it.

[ikeboy]

This is not really a good format for continuing this discussion, because lack of notifications and such. Would you consider opening an account on lesswrong and posting in open thread? Or you could PM my account there at http://lesswrong.com/user/ike/overview/. That said, here's my reply.

>Can you explain more clearly why what I said implies that, because I don't think I mean to say that.

It's basically a reformulation of the circularity argument.

I assume there's some level of pain that you would prefer to the specks; say a single second of torture, equivalent to a smack or such. (If you think we should prefer 3|||3 specks to one smack, I could go further, so let me know.)

So counting up from that one second at a time (i.e. 2 seconds of pain, 3 second, etc), eventually we reach a point where you no longer think it's better than the specks. Call this X.

So X and X-epsilon are qualitatively different; the lower amount is not bad enough to outweigh specks, but the higher amount is. You need to prefer giving X-epsilon to a large number of people rather than X to a single one, if the qualitative difference is to be upheld.

(I may not be phrasing this so well. Maybe try working through the circularity argument above, or the other phrasings I used in this thread.)

Now to respond to your line of reasoning: this proves too much.

Imagine instead of dust specks, we want everyone to donate a dollar to save the person from torture. Are you really going to say that we should be spending unbounded amounts of money (3|||3) to save anyone from torture? Have you donated all the money you could get to prevent torture? (and yes, I'm sure there are charities that are at least partially effective.)

Why doesn't your argument work for the case I just outlined as well?

[kybernetikos]

> I assume there's some level of pain that you would prefer to the specks; say a single second of torture, equivalent to a smack or such.

Quite possibly I prefer a world with one person tortured for a lifetime compared to 3|||3 specks if they are evaluated out of context. It's hard to say, because pain doesn't easily sum, there are different qualities of pain, and we are talking about situations where we may be losing an entire persons contribution to humanity. I just don't think any of this is relevant to the conversation, or to the reason that so many people find your conclusion unpalatable - and it's nothing to do with not understanding large numbers.

In the case that they are evaluated in the context of a choice between one of those worlds or the other world, I would take into account what I believe to be the value that the individuals involved would place on the worlds were they to know the details and have minimal moral standards like mine.

Let me phrase it another way:

What would you say the utility of a world where there are 3|||3 people with specks who chose it gladly and voluntarily to save someone from torture is?

Let's say you tell those 3|||3 who wanted to save someone from torture by accepting a speck in their eye that they cannot, and someone must be tortured instead. You've massively increased the unhappiness in the world - not only is an individual getting tortured, but 3|||3 have ended up with a situation that's worse than they wanted. Are you going to claim that it's still got a higher utility? Now that you notice that you're making those 3|||3 unhappy by the choice, you can see that the disutility scales with the number of people - that's why the number of people becomes irrelevant.

> Imagine instead of dust specks, we want everyone to donate a dollar to save the person from torture. Are you really going to say that we should be spending unbounded amounts of money (3|||3) to save anyone from torture?

Your phrasing is unnecessarily emotive here. You seem to be saying that 3|||3 dollars is an awful lot of dollars without giving me any context about what fraction of the dollars belonging to those 3|||3 people those 3|||3 dollars are or what else they could/should be spending it on. If it's a negligible fraction that scales, and I could plausibly think that any sane person should donate that fraction of their money to save a person from torture then yes. You'll notice that when it's phrased like that it does not require that I donate all the money I could get to prevent torture. I in fact do donate a small amount of money regularly to prevent torture, but I would demand much less of the 3|||3.

[ikeboy]

We're not talking about you accepting a dust mite in any of the scenarios. It's always other people.

So saying that you are selfish doesn't get you out of this, as long as you do prefer the world with less other people having specks.

Where is there a discontinuity when talking about other people being tortured or specked?

[kybernetikos]

I know that that is the formulation of the question, But since you're asking me to make the choice, you're asking me to inflict suffering on many extra people who would not have suffered otherwise. If what is gained by their suffering is large enough compared to that suffering that I believe they all (or nearly all) would have chosen voluntarily to accept the suffering for the benefit, then I am happy with the choice, and my best model for that is what suffering I would be prepared to undergo for what benefit. I think the confusion is between evaluating the utility between two possible alternatives (where obviously the world with fewer people suffering is better) vs evaluating the utility between two possible alternatives where those were the only two alternatives. If it's just two of many alternatives, the utility placed on a meaningful sacrifice doesn't come into it, but if it's a choice, the utility placed on a meaningful sacrifice does.