I agree with that. My point is that agreeing that “A googolplex people being dust speckled every second of their life without further ill effect is worse than one person being horribly tortured for the shortest period experiencable” doesn’t oblige me to agree that “A few billion* googolplexes of people being dust specked once without further ill effect is worse than one person being horribly tortured for the shortest period experiencable”.
Neither would I, you don’t need to. :-)
The only reason I can pull this off is because 3^^^3 is such a ludicrous number of people, allowing me to actually divide my army by a googolplex a silly number of times. You couldn’t cut the series up fine enough with a mere six billion people.
If you agree with my first two statements listed, you can use them (and your vast googolplex-cutter-proof army) to infer a series of small steps from each of Eliezer’s options, meeting in the middle at my third statement in the list. You then have a series of steps when a is worse than b, b than c, c than d, all the way from SPECS to my third statement to TORTURE.
If for some reason you object to one of the first 3 statements, my 3^^^3 vast hoard of minions will just cut the series up even finer.
If that’s not clear it’s probably my fault—I’ve never had to explain anything like this before.
if every one of those 3^^^3 people is willing to individually suffer a dust speck in order to prevent someone from suffering torture, is TORTURE still the right answer?
I agree with that. My point is that agreeing that “A googolplex people being dust speckled every second of their life without further ill effect is worse than one person being horribly tortured for the shortest period experiencable” doesn’t oblige me to agree that “A few billion* googolplexes of people being dust specked once without further ill effect is worse than one person being horribly tortured for the shortest period experiencable”.
Neither would I, you don’t need to. :-)
The only reason I can pull this off is because 3^^^3 is such a ludicrous number of people, allowing me to actually divide my army by a googolplex a silly number of times. You couldn’t cut the series up fine enough with a mere six billion people.
If you agree with my first two statements listed, you can use them (and your vast googolplex-cutter-proof army) to infer a series of small steps from each of Eliezer’s options, meeting in the middle at my third statement in the list. You then have a series of steps when a is worse than b, b than c, c than d, all the way from SPECS to my third statement to TORTURE.
If for some reason you object to one of the first 3 statements, my 3^^^3 vast hoard of minions will just cut the series up even finer.
If that’s not clear it’s probably my fault—I’ve never had to explain anything like this before.
if every one of those 3^^^3 people is willing to individually suffer a dust speck in order to prevent someone from suffering torture, is TORTURE still the right answer?
I sure would, but I wouldn’t ask 3^^^3 others to.