it means that you would prefer rather than a minor inconvenience to a family member, you would prefer something a billion times worse happening to a non-family member. To use an often used example, you would rather have a stranger tortured for years rather than have a dust speck get in your family member’s eye.
For five years of torture, I’d estimate that as 34 trillion times worse, assuming a perception takes about 100 msec and a human can register 20 logarithmic degrees of discomfort.
Thank you for FINALLY calculating that number. It’s very likely off by a few orders of magnitude due to the 20-logarithmic-degrees part (our hearing ranges more widely than this, I think) but at least you tried to bloody calculate it.
Here is a relevant paper which lets one estimate the number of bits sufficient to encode pain, by dividing the top firing rate by the baseline firing rate variability of a nociceptor and taking base 2 logarithm (the paper does not do it, but the data is there). My quick guess is that it’s at most a few bits (4 to 6), not 20, which is much less sensitive than hearing.
I didn’t suggest 20 bits; I suggested 20 distinguishable degrees of discomfort. Medical diagnosis sometimes uses ten, or is that six? which I thought was wrong at the low end — a dust speck is much less discomfort than anyone goes to the doctor for. 4 to 6 bits could encode 16 to 64 degrees of discomfort. I did presume that discomfort is logarithmic (since other senses are), and I conflated pain with irritation, which are not really subjectively the same.
If your point is that perceived pain is aggregated, you are right, of course. The above analysis is misguided, one should really look at the brain structures that make us perceive torture pain as a long-lasting unpleasant experience. A quick search suggests that the region of the brain primarily responsible for the unpleasantness of pain (as opposed to its perception) is the nociceptive area (area 24) of the Anterior cingulate cortex. I could not find, however, a reasonable way to calculate the dynamic range of the pain affect beyond the usual 10-level scale self-assessment.
It’s not obvious that disutility would scale linearly with amount of torture; would you be indifferent between a 100% chance of getting a dust speck in your eye and a 1 in 34 trillion chance of being tortured for five years?
(My intuition probably doesn’t work right with such small numbers, so I don’t know myself.)
Thanks for pointing that out. That comment that you linked to seems a valuable post in the discussion of torture verses dust specs. I just used torture versus dust specks in my comment for familiarity value. To consider the question more formally, of course, you need to find two things, one trivial and one major, that the ratio of badness is exactly 1 to a billion. The exact details do not exactly matter to my point, but you are right that the example I gave is not technically accurate.
For five years of torture, I’d estimate that as 34 trillion times worse, assuming a perception takes about 100 msec and a human can register 20 logarithmic degrees of discomfort.
Thank you for FINALLY calculating that number. It’s very likely off by a few orders of magnitude due to the 20-logarithmic-degrees part (our hearing ranges more widely than this, I think) but at least you tried to bloody calculate it.
Here is a relevant paper which lets one estimate the number of bits sufficient to encode pain, by dividing the top firing rate by the baseline firing rate variability of a nociceptor and taking base 2 logarithm (the paper does not do it, but the data is there). My quick guess is that it’s at most a few bits (4 to 6), not 20, which is much less sensitive than hearing.
I didn’t suggest 20 bits; I suggested 20 distinguishable degrees of discomfort. Medical diagnosis sometimes uses ten, or is that six? which I thought was wrong at the low end — a dust speck is much less discomfort than anyone goes to the doctor for. 4 to 6 bits could encode 16 to 64 degrees of discomfort. I did presume that discomfort is logarithmic (since other senses are), and I conflated pain with irritation, which are not really subjectively the same.
I suppose humans have more than one nociceptor each? ;-)
If your point is that perceived pain is aggregated, you are right, of course. The above analysis is misguided, one should really look at the brain structures that make us perceive torture pain as a long-lasting unpleasant experience. A quick search suggests that the region of the brain primarily responsible for the unpleasantness of pain (as opposed to its perception) is the nociceptive area (area 24) of the Anterior cingulate cortex. I could not find, however, a reasonable way to calculate the dynamic range of the pain affect beyond the usual 10-level scale self-assessment.
It’s not obvious that disutility would scale linearly with amount of torture; would you be indifferent between a 100% chance of getting a dust speck in your eye and a 1 in 34 trillion chance of being tortured for five years?
(My intuition probably doesn’t work right with such small numbers, so I don’t know myself.)
Thanks for pointing that out. That comment that you linked to seems a valuable post in the discussion of torture verses dust specs. I just used torture versus dust specks in my comment for familiarity value. To consider the question more formally, of course, you need to find two things, one trivial and one major, that the ratio of badness is exactly 1 to a billion. The exact details do not exactly matter to my point, but you are right that the example I gave is not technically accurate.