| >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 If the people are told of the choice, that's a whole new problem, but that's kind of avoiding the point of the original question. To use a hacking analogy, you're using a side-channel to cheat. Nobody is told about any of this. If they were, that would itself need to be factored in, and quite possibly lead me to prefer specks. >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. Each person isn't donating to save someone from torture, they're donating to save 1/3|||3 of torture. Let's rephrase the original question to zero in on that last point. There are 3|||3 people. You choose the number of people who donate one dollar, which can be any number between 0 and 3|||3. After you make a decision, one of those people is chosen at random, and they are tortured iff they did not donate. If you think about it, this results in the exact same outcomes in either choice, except you have more options than all or nothing. You basically choose the probability of torture. To be consistent with your previous view, you'd need to not pick zero donaters. So for at least some people, it should be worth it for them to pay 1 dollar to avoid a 1/3|||3 probability of torture. This dissolves, as you may have noticed, into Pascal's Wager. (Or Pascal's Mugging, more precisely, which was coined by Yudkowsky.) What if I tell you that unless you give me a dollar, I'm going to torture you for 50 years? The probability of that being true is more than 1/3|||3 (and if you disagree, then you are way too overconfident for life. 3|||3 is a huge number, and there's no conclusions I can think of in which I'd place that much confidence. We don't even have anywhere near the kind of raw data to draw any conclusion that confident.) So are you willing to give up a dollar to avoid the >1/3|||3 chance that I'm telling the truth? If not, and all or most of those people in the problem would answer the same, then your previous rationale falls apart. (Oh, and this is not the real Pascal's Mugging; that's much harder to deal with. But let's stick with the easy stuff for now, shall we?) Also, what about the argument in http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/ueo (And if we're going to continue this, could you please move it over to another forum? It's getting harder to keep track of comments here.) |
Exactly. My whole contention is that the reason this question is considered unintuitive by so many people is that they're really considering a different question to the one you think you're asking.