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Some people thrive for decades (including Stephen Hawking) tube fed with nutritionally complete enteral formulas. Semi-annual blood tests pick up any deficiencies, and supplements are added if needed. Several companies make "Soylent", the one I am familiar with is Abbott Nutrition.
So you would be willing to keep sending more and more people to torture for trivial less discomfort for the majority for each person tortured. At what point would you say enough is enough?
Don’t be bamboozled by big numbers, it is exactly the same problem: How far would you go to maximize pain in the minority in order to minimize it in the majority. As Eliezer argued so forcefully in the comments above, this problem exists on a continuum and if you want to break the chain at any point you have to justify why that point and not another.
Your argument for 1:1,000,000 does not go far enough in minimising pain for the majority. One person cannot take the pain of 1,000,000 people without dying or at least becoming unconscious. I suspect the maximum “other people’s pain” a person could endure without losing conscious is broadly between 5 and 50, let’s say 25.
So if you are willing to send one human being out of 3^^^3 people to be tortured for 50 years to remove a vanishingly small momentary discomfort for the majority, then you must also be willing to continually torture 1 in 25 people to eradicate all pain in the majority of the other 24. They are two ends of the same continuum, you cannot break the chain.
Both instances are brutally unfair on the people tortured, but at least in the second instance the majority will lead better lives while in the first instance not a single person is aware they had one less blink of discomfort in their entire lifetime. So my question remains to the torturers, are you a monster for sending 1 in 25 people to be tortured?
OK, so you would accept less than one person per universe to be tortured for 50 years for everyone to avoid occasional mild discomfort. But that doesn’t answer the question of how far you are willing to take this logic. We haven’t even began to touch serious discomfort like half the population getting menstrual cramps every month, let alone prolonged pain and suffering. Would you send one person per planet for torture? One person per city? One person per family?
The end result of this game is that a significant minority of people are being tortured at any one time so the majority can live lives free of discomfort, pain and suffering. So is your acceptable ratio 1:1,000,000, 1:10?
I have been reading less wrong about 6 month but this is my first post. I'm not an expert but an interested amateur. I read this post about 3 weeks ago and thought it was a joke. After working through replies and following links, I get it is a serious question with serious consequences in the world today. I don’t think my comments duplicate others already in the thread so here goes…
Let’s call this a “one blink” discomfort (it comes and goes in a blink) and let’s say that on average each person gets one every 10 minutes during their waking hours. In reality it is probably more, but you forget about such things almost as quick as they happen. If it is “right” to send one person to 50 years of torture to save 3^^^3 from a one blink discomfort, it is right to send 6 people per hour to the same fate for each of the sixteen waking hours per day, for a total of 96 people per day and 35,040 people each year.
And if it is right to send 35,040 to 50 years of torture to save 3^^^3 people for a single year from all one blink discomforts, then it is right to send another 35,040 to the same fate in order to save 3^^^3 people from all two blink discomforts, assuming each person on average get a two blink discomfort (it comes and goes in two blinks) thrice per hour. We have now saved the multiverse from all one and two bink discomforts for one year at the cost of sending 70,080 people to 50 years torture.
By the time the first person comes out of torture 50 years later, over 3.5 million people will have followed them into the torture chambers to save everyone else from discomforts lasting two blinks or less. If you follow the logic through from one blink up to each person gets one mild cold or some such per year that inflicts 2 days of discomfort, and you are sending untold trillions to 50 years torture every year. It seems to me a significant minority of the population would be in the torture chambers at any one time to save the majority from discomfort.
My question to the torturers is how far are you willing to take your logic before you look at yourself in the mirror and see a monster?