The loss of $100,000 (or one cent) is more or less significant depending on the individual. Which is worse: stealing a cent from 100,000,000 people, or stealing $100,000 from a billionaire? What if the 100,000,000 people are very poor and the cent would buy half a slice of bread and they were hungry to start with? (Tiny dust specks, at least, have a comparable annoyance effect on almost everyone.)
Eliezer’s main gaffe here is choosing a “googolplex” people with dust specks when humans do not even have an intuition for googols. So let’s scale the problem down to a level a human can understand: instead of a googolplex dust specks versus 50 years of torture, let’s take “50 years of torture versus a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros) dust specks”, and scale it down linearly to “1 second of torture verses “6.33 x 10^90 dust specks, one per person”—which is still far more people than have ever lived, so let’s make it “a dust speck once per minute for every person on Earth for their entire lives (while awake) and make it retroactive for all of our human ancestors too” (let’s pretend for a moment that humans won’t evolve a resistance to dust specks as a result). By doing this we are still eliminating virtually all of the dust specks.
So now we have one second of torture versus roughly 2 billion billions of dust specks, which is nothing at all compared to a googol of dust specks. Once the numbers are scaled down to a level that ordinary college graduates can begin to comprehend, I think many of them would change their answer. Indeed, some people might volunteer for one second of torture just to save themselves from getting a tiny dust speck in their eye every minute for the rest of their lives.
The fact that humans can’t feel these numbers isn’t something you teach by just saying it. You teach it by creating a tension between the feeling brain and the thinking brain. Due to your ego, I would guess your brain can better imagine feeling a tiny dust speck in its eye once per minute for your entire life − 20 million specks—than 20 million people getting a tiny dust speck in their eye once, but how is it any different morally? For most people also, 20 billion people with a dust speck feels just the same as 20 million. They both feel like “really big numbers”, but in reality one number is a thousand times worse, and your thinking brain can see that. In this way, I hope you learn to trust your thinking brain more than your feeling one.
The loss of $100,000 (or one cent) is more or less significant depending on the individual. Which is worse: stealing a cent from 100,000,000 people, or stealing $100,000 from a billionaire? What if the 100,000,000 people are very poor and the cent would buy half a slice of bread and they were hungry to start with? (Tiny dust specks, at least, have a comparable annoyance effect on almost everyone.)
Eliezer’s main gaffe here is choosing a “googolplex” people with dust specks when humans do not even have an intuition for googols. So let’s scale the problem down to a level a human can understand: instead of a googolplex dust specks versus 50 years of torture, let’s take “50 years of torture versus a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros) dust specks”, and scale it down linearly to “1 second of torture verses “6.33 x 10^90 dust specks, one per person”—which is still far more people than have ever lived, so let’s make it “a dust speck once per minute for every person on Earth for their entire lives (while awake) and make it retroactive for all of our human ancestors too” (let’s pretend for a moment that humans won’t evolve a resistance to dust specks as a result). By doing this we are still eliminating virtually all of the dust specks.
So now we have one second of torture versus roughly 2 billion billions of dust specks, which is nothing at all compared to a googol of dust specks. Once the numbers are scaled down to a level that ordinary college graduates can begin to comprehend, I think many of them would change their answer. Indeed, some people might volunteer for one second of torture just to save themselves from getting a tiny dust speck in their eye every minute for the rest of their lives.
The fact that humans can’t feel these numbers isn’t something you teach by just saying it. You teach it by creating a tension between the feeling brain and the thinking brain. Due to your ego, I would guess your brain can better imagine feeling a tiny dust speck in its eye once per minute for your entire life − 20 million specks—than 20 million people getting a tiny dust speck in their eye once, but how is it any different morally? For most people also, 20 billion people with a dust speck feels just the same as 20 million. They both feel like “really big numbers”, but in reality one number is a thousand times worse, and your thinking brain can see that. In this way, I hope you learn to trust your thinking brain more than your feeling one.