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Comment by wilde | Hacker News Reader

The arrogant tone of the website is deeply frustrating. Especially since their examples are full of false premises. For example, in the nuke question they estimate torture’s efficacy at 70%. That’s way, way higher than the actual efficacy.

There are interesting questions here presented very poorly.

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I've always wondered about that. It's generally reported that torture is largely ineffective because people will say anything to make it stop. However, that also includes the people who are being tortured and genuinely do not know the answer.

Whereas the fat terrorist can be tortured and then his answers checked with the NEST team and can be tortured again until the right answer is found, or until the device explodes. He knows this, so once it's clear that they really will torture him and check his answers, he can indeed end it with the right answer.

The problem is that there's no way to tell the difference between someone saying anything to make the torture stop and someone who is simply lying and actually knows the answer. You need additional information to verify information, for example, A who confesses under torture that B, C, and D are also terrorists has very little or no way to verify without also torturing B, C, and D to confess to terrorism. But there's no way to verify that any of those confessions are true either unless they point to something, the easiest of which is pointing to other supposed terrorists...

Yes, exactly. But in this case (hidden nuke), you send the nuclear response team to the location and if they say it's there, you have your answer. If it's not, you start on the next finger and keep going until you find the bomb or the bomb explodes (or the terrorist dies).

Of course you're still vulnerable to fakeouts with a decoy device, booby traps or multiple devices, which a sufficiently paranoid fat terrorist would use if he thought he could be caught and tortured, but that's not the scenario given.

The real world effectiveness of torture actually doesn't matter for evaluating the given scenario. You should be able and willing to think about what you would do with the given constraints. Even if you think it's only 0.1% effective instead of 75%, you still have given as facts that the man confessed to planting the bomb and that a million people will definitely die if the bomb isn't found in less than 24 hours.

>You should be able and willing to think about what you would do with the given constraints.

Should I? That's basically claiming that I should have an answer for when I'm half way down any given slippery slope.

I would instead point out that (as a general matter and specifically in this case as the constraints bear no relation to reality) a slippery slope is a logical fallacy and I should no more be expected to have a pre-set contingency for every possible trolley problem than I should for waking up and finding out that 1+1=Banana.

> Should I?

If you care about the consistency of your framework, then yes, I believe so.

> I would instead point out that (as a general matter and specifically in this case as the constraints bear no relation to reality) a slippery slope is a logical fallacy

The presented scenarios are not any kind of slippery slope fallacy, so your statement is a non sequitur.

I think your point is right, but I admit I struggled here. It's trying to constrain the scenario, but it's both too unrealistic and not constrained enough for me to manage. Here's what I was thinking.

First off, torture as far as I understand has way worse outcomes than 75% success, and I don't think information like a full blown confession is very often had. But OK, 75% chance they find out where it is with a definite admission of guilt. No chance they get bad information during torture. Howw long do they do the torture to get that info? 1 minute? 23 hours and 59 minutes? Is that really enough time to dispatch the team? Let's say they have enough time though. The scenario says "if the bomb is found, there's a chance it can be disarmed." What kind of chance? 99%? .00001%? If they fail to disarm it, did you send a team of people off to die with the other 1 million? Or do they evacuate to survive? Is it worth potentially sacrificing more people on the chance you can help then?

It was just too much for me I guess. But truly I agree with you. Maybe over a longer period of time I can think more clearly about it with more constraints to help me.

> Howw long do they do the torture to get that info? 1 minute? 23 hours and 59 minutes? Is that really enough time to dispatch the team?

You won't know until you try.

> If they fail to disarm it, did you send a team of people off to die with the other 1 million?

This sounds like you're suggesting that nobody should ever try to disarm a bomb. I think it's safe to assume that the people who disarm bombs have chosen to do so and weren't forced into it.

Oh totally. I was just annoyed that the prompt after that was “see! You actually don’t think torture is wrong!”

The site seems to think that morality is a set of unparameterized rules blindly followed. That is frustrating.

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