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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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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.

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

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

With the appropriate caveats regarding computation time and other side effects of avoiding those extreme consequences.

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.

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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