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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"This outcome is very, very bad. In fact it's infinitely bad. But I choose it anyway because I don't care whether I get a result that's infinitely bad."

There's something peculiar about this stand but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Gray, are you sure one's own death has a utility to oneself ? It would seem more like a constraint on the available utility, that which exists while living. So the guy who's asked for what he would accept to die in 5 seconds is comparing a 5 second life to a longer one, not comparing a 5 second life to death.Ticking time bombs and torture : the utility cost of the torture is not in any of the more or less far fetched knock-on scenarios, it is in the destruction of our own identity, as individuals and as nations, with high costs, both internal and external. And to come back to an earlier point, those identities, for many individuals and cultures, for better or worse, are based on valuing empathy (we're back to the affect heuristic), more than utility calculations. A consideration of the sociological impact to any of the cultures which have stepped over that line within say the last century, compared to their dominant values system, would demonstrate the point.

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