Eliezer asked a follow-up question in the thread: would you pay a penny to avoid the dust specks?
Imagine a society of 3^^^3 people, first in a universe in which the dust speck thing happened to all of them, and then in one in which it didn't happen. What would we expect to see different between the societies, 1 minute, 1 day, 1 year afterward? Would there be any difference? Any new wars or suffering?
The only reasonable outcome in which the dust specks would be worse would be, admittedly, if there's a non-negligible portion of the population that, as a result of getting the dust speck while operating machinery or doing something important like surgery, ends up making some terrible mistake that causes lasting harm to someone or themselves. In that case, the outcome is "hey, some huge number of people got maimed or killed, so the torture of one is OK in comparison."
But my thought is that your line of reasoning would still be held even if all 3^^^3 people were given the dust speck when they are sitting alone in their room away from any potentially-dangerous objects. Is that the case? In that particular case I don't see what the dust speck would actually do to any person in the future (beyond a single sensory experience in the present).
And to answer your question, I wouldn't pay a penny to avoid the dust speck. Maybe I'm just particularly frugal, being a grad student at the moment.
I think you would expect to see differences. You've made 3^^^3 days slightly worse, and there's no way that none of those slightly-worse days had knock-on effects.
But I'm also not sure it matters. If something is bad in-the-moment, but has no knock-on effects, that still seems bad. If you could torture me for a minute, then erase my memories and replace them with memories of a minute spent doing what I was previously doing anyway... I would accept that for some amount of money, but not for a penny.
Change the game slightly: in one world, torture for fifty years and then the person dies, they don't interact with anyone for any of that time. In the other world, dust specks, but also one person is locked away for fifty years, not interacting with anyone, and then they die.
Which do you choose? Sixty years from now, which do you wish you'd chosen?
> I wouldn't pay a penny to avoid the dust speck
Do you mean just your own dust speck? The question was all 3^^^3 of them.
If you do mean all of them... I would pay a penny to avoid dust specks in seven billion eyes, let alone 3^^^3. If one could press a button that would put a dust speck in the eyes of everyone currently alive (at some future time where they're not operating machinery etc.), and in exchange the presser would receive a penny, I would not press that button and I'd be pissed off at anyone who did. (Maybe not anyone, but at least anyone who isn't struggling to live.)
a) would you press the 7bn specks button for an individual 'reward' of $70million?
b) would you press the N-specks button if given a choice between that and the 1-torture button?
Why not? I'm entirely comfortable saying that the lasting lifetime impact of a single speck of dust in someone's eye is zero, given that it has no lasting physiological consequences and in short order will be forgotten about completely.
Example (this is actually true!) -- I have a life-long inflammation in both eyes that started in one eye when I was about 5, and eventually spread to the other.
The specialists weren't able to figure out the original cause; their best guess was basically a speck of dust -- just the wrong speck of dust (maybe with a microorganism in it?), in the wrong place, that my immune system attacked and then just kept on attacking even after the original speck had been gone for years. Medication plus a series of unpleasant surgeries have managed to keep my eyes relatively functional, so far, but others with the same condition certainly do lose all vision.
Obviously this isn't a common result; but given enough specks of dust.... Well, you have to start doing some math.