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To be clear here, I have two main points:
Some categories of pain are simply incomparable to others (either because they're simply different or because no amount of 1 suffering will ever equal or surpass the other)
Moral reasoning is not really meant for such extreme numbers
Has anyone ever experienced such nerve damage as a result of a decision they took? Do we know that it's even theoretically possible? I can't imagine that really any amount of carpal tunnel is actually equivalent to many years of deliberate torture, even if 3↑↑↑3 worlds exist and we choose the person who suffers the worst carpal tunnel out of all of them. So I'd probably say that this risk is literally 0, not just arbitrarily small. I have plenty of other ways to fight the hypothetical too--things like time considering the choice (which you mentioned), the chance that a better word choice will help other people or help the book sell better, etc.
The point in fighting the hypothetical is to support my point #2. At some point hypotheticals simply don't do a very good job of exposing and clarifying our moral principles. I generally use "gut feelings" to evaluate these thought experiments, but these gut feelings are deeply tied to other circumstances surrounding the hypothetical, like the (much, much greater) chance that a better word choice will lead to better sales or a substantially better reader experience for someone.
Common sense says you shouldn't worry about carpal tunnel when typing. It's easy to say "ok ignore the obvious objections, just focus on the real meat of the thought experiment" but hard to convince common sense and ethical intuition to go along with such a contrived experiment. I'll try and reverse it for you, so that common sense/ethical intuition are on my side but the meat of the argument is the same.
Let's go back to my original scenario of Maximally Miniscule Suffering vs. Maximal Suffering. You are immortal. You can either choose to experience all of the suffering in Maximal Suffering right away, or all of the suffering in Maximally Miniscule Suffering right away.
I think this gets to the heart of my point because
If you sum up all of the suffering and give it to a single person, IMO the minimal suffering will add up to a lot less than the maximal suffering. The former is simply a different type of suffering that I don't think ever adds up to the latter. I would much rather see in black and white for a practically infinite amount of time than experience a practically infinite amount of torture.
By the time you're finally through with maximal suffering in 10^10^100 years or so you will basically be totally insane and incapable of joy. But let's ignore that and assume that you'll be fine. I bring this up because I think even though I say "let's ignore that", when it comes to ethical intuition, you can't really just ignore it, it will still play a role in how you feel about the whole scenario. The only way to really ignore it is to mentally come up with some add-on to the thought experiment like "and then I'm healed so that I am not insane", which fundamentally changes what the thought experiment is.
It is precisely the ability to convert between mild experiences and extreme experiences at some ratio that allows everything to add up to something resembling common-sense morality. If you don't, if the ranking of bad experiences from most mild to most severe has one considered infinitely worse than the one that came before, then your decision-making will be dominated by whichever potential consequences pass that threshold while completely disregarding everything below that threshold, regardless of how unlikely those extreme consequences are. You seem to be taking the fact that the risks in these hypotheticals are not worth actual consideration as a point against these hypotheticals, but of course that is the point the hypotheticals are making.
Nothing in the universe will ever be 3↑↑↑3, but 7 billion people is already far beyond intuitive moral reasoning. We still have to make decisions affecting them whether our moral reasoning is meant for it or not. Which includes reacting differently to something bad happening to one person out of millions of beneficiaries than to one person out of hundreds of beneficiaries.
In some percentage of cases the cancer spreads to your brain, you get surgery to remove the tumor, and the brain surgeon messes up in precisely the right way. Both "locked-in syndrome" and chronic pain are things that happen, it's hardly a stretch to think a combination of both that paralyzes you for 50 years while you experience continuous agony is physically possible. And of course even if you were uncertain whether it was physically possible, that's just another thing to multiply the improbability by. It's not that rounding the probability down to 0 doesn't make sense in terms of practical decision-making, it's that "1 in 3↑↑↑3" odds are unimaginably less likely, so you should round them down to 0 too.
I do not think this is a meaningful statement. We can decide which scenario is preferable and call that something like "net utility" but we can't literally "add up" multiple people's experiences within a single person. It doesn't have a coherent meaning so we are free to arbitrarily imagine whatever we want. That said, to the extent that its meaning can be nailed down at all, I think it would favor avoiding the 3↑↑↑3 option. My understanding is that a single pain receptor firing once is not noticeable. If a form of suffering is instead barely noticeable, it is presumably "bigger" than a single pain receptor firing. There are only 37 trillion cells the the human body, so the number of pain receptors is something smaller than that. So the first step in multiplying barely-noticeable suffering by 3↑↑↑3 is that it goes from "worse than a pain receptor firing" to "worse than every pain receptor firing continuously for an extended period". And that doesn't make a dent in 3↑↑↑3, so we multiply further, such as by making it last unimaginably longer than merely 10^100 times the lifespan of the universe.
That is a pretty arbitrary and meaningless matter of interpretation though. A more meaningful measure would be the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, You're a random member of a population of 3↑↑↑3, is it better for you that 10^100 of them be tortured or all of them experience a dropped frame in a video? This is equivalent to what I answered in my previous post, that it would be foolish to sacrifice anything to avoid such odds.
Yes, this is essentially how I think morality and decision-making should work. Going back to your word choice example, the actual word choice should matter not at all in a vacuum, but it has a chance of having other effects (such as better book sales, saving someone's life from suicide, etc.) which I think are much more likely than the chance that typing in the extra word causes chronic torturous pain.
In real life, small harms like stubbing a toe can lead to greater harms like missing an important opportunity due to the pain, breaking a bone, or perhaps snapping at someone important due to your bad mood. If we could ignore those side effects and focus on just the pain, I would absolutely agree that
With the appropriate caveats regarding computation time and other side effects of avoiding those extreme consequences.
See this is kind of my point. I don't think we can just say that there's "net utility" and directly compare small harms to great ones. I agree that it doesn't necessarily make much sense to just "add up" the suffering though, so here's another example.
You're immortal. You can choose to be tortured for 100 years straight, or experience a stubbed toe once every billion years, forever. Neither option has any side effects.I would always choose the stubbed toe option even though it adds up to literally infinite suffering, so by extension I would force infinite people to stub their toes rather than force one person to be tortured for 100 years.
edit: One more thing, it's not that I think there's some bright line, above which things matter, and below which they don't. My point is mainly that these things are simply not quantifiable at all.
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