Comment by jsartor7 on Torture vs. Dust Specks · 2019-11-29T20:02:00.187Z · LW · GW

Min is a really bad metric - it means that, for example, my decision of whether to torture someone or not doesn't matter as long as someone out there is also getting tortured. So it doesn't actually lead to an answer of the dust speck problem. And if you limit it to the min of people involved, it leads to things like... "then it's better to break 1 billion people's non-dominant arms than one person's dominant arm" which in my opinion is absurd.