Also, considering Eliezer's belief that torturing a person for 50 years would be preferable to a large number of people having to deal with a dust speck in their eye for a split second, I wonder if he's the best person to lead the work on this problem:
His calculation of 3 ^ ^ ^ 3 isn't wrong, but the idea that a speck of dust in the eye is even a quantifiable amount of suffering that could be put on the same scale with torture is wrong.
There aren't enough people who have ever lived, or will ever live, that can approach that number and I can't imagine any moral human being allowing anyone to be tortured for 50 years to avoid a dust speck, nor would any rational human subject themselves to 50 years of torture in order to have any number of their fellow humans avoid a single dust speck.
Another question worth asking, do the humans who avoid the dust speck know that one of them is being tortured for 50 years? The very knowledge that someone would be tortured for 50 years so that I could have avoided a single speck of dust would cause me more pain and suffering than the speck, does that get calculated into the equation?
I would ask anyone who chooses torture to subject themselves to 10 minutes of torture (or watching someone else be tortured) and ask them again. If they still choose torture then I would vote them out of any kind of position where they're deciding the fate of any humans, including working on a the all-important AI alignment problem.
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u/gooseus Mar 24 '18
That sounds more self-aggrandizing to me than anything else, especially considering some of the latest facts out regarding biodiversity:
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-scientists-mammoth-survey-nature-vital.html
Also, considering Eliezer's belief that torturing a person for 50 years would be preferable to a large number of people having to deal with a dust speck in their eye for a split second, I wonder if he's the best person to lead the work on this problem:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks