I think one of the reasons I finally chose specks is because the unlike implied, the suffering does not simply “add up”: 3^^^3 people getting one dust speck in their eye is most certainly not equal to one person getting 3^^^3 dust specks in his eyes. It’s not “3^^^3 units of disutility, total”, it’s one unit of disutility per person.
That still doesn’t really answer the “one person for 50 years or two people for 49 years” question, though—by my reasoning, the second option would be preferrable, while obviously the first option is the preferrable one. I might need to come up with a guideline stating that only experiences of suffering within a few orders of magnitude are directly comparable with each other, or some such, but it does feel like a crude hack. Ah well.
If statistics are being gathered, I’m a second year cognitive science student.
I think one of the reasons I finally chose specks is because the unlike implied, the suffering does not simply “add up”: 3^^^3 people getting one dust speck in their eye is most certainly not equal to one person getting 3^^^3 dust specks in his eyes. It’s not “3^^^3 units of disutility, total”, it’s one unit of disutility per person.
That still doesn’t really answer the “one person for 50 years or two people for 49 years” question, though—by my reasoning, the second option would be preferrable, while obviously the first option is the preferrable one. I might need to come up with a guideline stating that only experiences of suffering within a few orders of magnitude are directly comparable with each other, or some such, but it does feel like a crude hack. Ah well.
If statistics are being gathered, I’m a second year cognitive science student.