Playing gotcha with word games is a distraction from your underlying assumption that utility functions must be linear.
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It's not a little gotcha! Even on the most naive numbers, billions of people with dust specks in their eyes are quantitatively better than 50 years of torment. And you need doubly-exponential quantities, like a googolplex, to make the obvious argument from circular preferences.
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Where the preference chain is "Clearly X people getting two dust specks in their eyes is better than googol*X people getting one dust speck in their eye" (...) "One victim for 50 years is better than a googol people tormented for fifty years minus one second."
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Can we use words like uneducated or ignorant I dunno
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Ignorant but mentally healthy people say "I don't know" or "incomprehensibly large". An alternative sort of person (who often hates me) rounds down to a quintillion, because that is the largest number they know, so it must be as large as anything gets.
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I think mentally healthy is an even worse descriptor, unless your definition of mentally healthy includes like, more than half of the population. I don't think you have to be particularly smart or mentally healthy to understand big numbers, you just need to be taught.
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Stupid is not "not knowing what a googolplex is", it's the way of thinking "what I don't understand can't be important so I'll round it to a quintillion".
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Ok I guess I misunderstood your tweet then.
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It would have been better if you'd used a googleplex in the first case I think. But yes, this a classic "I'll sneer at this argument by making it clear to the world I completely don't understand it".
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It's hard to guess in advance, rather than in retrospect, which part the idiots will misquote, or what wordsmithing is needed to prevent it. But yes, I now know to use googolplexes rather than Ackermann numbers in thought experiments requiring bignums.
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Hey, I'm pro-torture at quintillions and anti-torture at billions. Learn to differentiate the two!
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Hm. Is rounding 3^^^3 to 'quintillions' literally the biggest understatement in human history?
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No, but only because other similar commentators have rounded it to "billions".
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How do you know the utility of pain is additive across individuals ? Seems to me that a complex utility aggregation function is more morally intuitive. One with enough non linearities to have hard threshold effects on X.
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Actually I think what they're rounding down is the tiniest noticeable pain to zero, so in their minds the comparison becomes 1 human with an impacted life vs 0 humans with impacted lives
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Has there or will there ever be a bignum of people ? It's an eternally virtual paradigme, not to mention that there should be a higher upper limit than a needle prick for going from slight inconvenience to actual pain that's equatable to torture after multiplication by bignum.
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What you're calling a lack of smarts might just be the general human difficulty with grasping the difference between the scope of the two quantities of big numbers. People already have a hard time with grasping billion and trillion.
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My favorite test of the number line for my nephew or nieces is to place objects down ten units (of the object) from one another and have them tell me where 100 or 1000 units would be. 1000 always surprises them (the first time). With that I don't think about large numbers.
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Following 'K': but first generate quintillions of ems, use "non-speciesist" logic, and it's the ems that don't get pinpricks, and you've justified torture, if you're a total kneejerk utilitarian.
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1. Quintillions isn't big enough 2. If you generate a lot of people just to hurt or threaten them, you are being evil. Maybe torture is the lesser of two evils.
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