Thanks for this over the holidays. (You asked for feedback from practical applications).
It helped me come to the realization on why some stores can get away with put horribly, stupidly expensive chocolates on display right at the counter top: not only do they want you to buy it (duh), but it also lets your recipients know that you bought them a $5.99 bar of chocolate that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the larger $1.49 chocolate bars at the grocery store (assuming that your recipients have shopped at the same stores as you and are aware of how “nice” the gift is).
As a result we bought several overpriced chocolate bars to show how generous we were.
Another good item which I bought for someone for his birthday (unconciously following the above advice) was a $15 version of the fifteen puzzle. Compare vs. an $18 paperback book I was considering for that gift.
Now I’m wrestling with the inverse problem. I find myself wanting an Asus Eee PC, and justifying it to my wife because of how cheap it is - $399. Which is the same price as the PS3, which I don’t even bring up because of how expensive it is - $399.
My initial reaction (before I started to think...) was to pick the dust specks, given that my biases made the suffering caused by the dust specks morally equivalent to zero, and 0^^^3 is still 0.
However, given that the problem stated an actual physical phenomenon (dust specks), and not a hypothetical minimal annoyance, then you kind of have to take the other consequences of the sudden appearance of the dust specks under consideration, don’t you?
If I was omnipotent, and I could make everyone on Earth get a dust speck in their eye right now, how many car accidents would occur? Heavy machinery accidents? Workplace accidents? Even if the chance is vanishingly small—let’s say 6 accidents occur on Earth because everyone got a dust speck in their eye. That’s one in a billion.
That’s one accident for every 10e9 people. Now, what percentage of those are fatal? Transport Canada currently lists the 23.7 of car accidents in 2003 as resulting in a fatality, which is 1 in 4. Let’s be nice, and assume that everywhere else on earth safer, and take that down to 1 in 100 accidents being fatal.
Now, if everyone in existence gets a dust speck in their eye because of my decision, assuming the hypothetical 3^^^3 people live in something approximating the lifestyles on Earth, I’ve conceivably doomed 1 in 10e11 people to death.
That is, my cloud of dust specks have killed 3^^^3 / 10e11 people.