Broken arms vs toes: I agree that any number of broken toes wouldn't be better than a broken arm. But that's the point, these are _comparable_.
Incomparable breaks occur where you put the ellipses in your list. Torture for 40-50 years vs torture for 1 day is qualitatively distinct. I imagine a human being can bounce back from torture for 1 day, have scars but manage to prosper. That would be hellishly more difficult with torture for 40 years. We could count torture by day, 1-(365*40) and there would be a point of no return there. A duration of torture a person can't bounce back. It would depend on the person, what happens during and after etc, which is why it's not possible to compute that day. That doesn't mean we should ignore how humans work.
Here's the main beef I have with Dust Specks vs Torture: Statements like "1 million broken toes" or "3^^^3 dust specks" disregard human experience. That many dust specks on one person is torture. One on each is _practically nothing_. I'm simulating people experiencing these, and the result I arrive at is this; choose best outcome from (0 utils * 3^^^3) vs (-3^^^3 utils). This is easy to answer.
You may say "but 1 dust speck on a person isn't 0 utils, it's a very small negative utility" and yes, technically you're correct. But before doing the sum over people, take a look at the people. *Distribution matters.*
Humans don't work like linear sensory devices. Utility can't work linearly as well.
Intuitively speaking broken arm and broken toe are comparable. Broken arm is worse, broken toe is still bad. I'd rather get a broken arm than torture for 50 years, or even torture for 1 day.
For sliding scale of severities: there's a very difficult to compute but intuitively satisfying emphasis that can be imposed so the scale can't slide. It's the idea of "bouncing back". If you can't bounce back from an action that imparts negative utility, it forms a distinct class of utilities. Compare broken arm with torn-off toe. Compare both of those to 50 years of torture.
P.S: If you're familiar with Taleb's idea of "antifragility", that's the notion I'm basing these on.
I started living alone, then with 3 other friends (ran into problems in 3 - 4 months) and now with only 1 other friend.
My current flat-mate is a reasonable person, not much chit-chat but a cat helped to warm the intra-house athmosphere.
Before this, we lived in a really beautiful house (nice terrace, BBQ potential etc) but the whole thing went sour when one person decided to change his lifestyle in a couple of days. It certainly wasn't fun, but the house was nice. We all had large space to ourselves, but with only 2 people a smaller house still gives enough space per person.
When I lived completely alone, I slacked and became productive in a cyclic pattern, upping productivity come midterm times, slacking at the ends of exams etc.
In all those times (except a few months in a tense house last year) I had weekly visitors, a trio of people plus whomever else I know occasionaly. I really like visitors, but this whole series of living "at my home" made me a kind of recluse. I'd rather have people in the house, rather than go out to meet them.
I'd love to try out the kind of environment Vika talked about, a rationalist house sounds like a pretty nice place to change things about myself with the help of socially helpful people having (hopefully) less than average inferential distances between.
First survey and comment, and I liked it too! (Including the bonuses, especially the reward question :)
To me all the talk about utilities seem broken at a fundamental level. An implication of Timeless Decision Theory should be that an agent running TDT calculates utilities as an integral over time, so final values don't have any explicit time dependence.
This fixes a lot of things, especially when combined with the texture of human experience. Utility should be a function of the states of the world it affects integrated over time. Since we don't get to make that calculation in detail, we can approximate by choosing the kinds of actions that minimize the future bad impacts and maximize good ones.
This is the only view of utility that I can think of that preserves the "wisdom of the elders" point of view. It's strange how often they turn out to be right as one ages, in saying "only care for the ones caring for you", "focus on bettering yourself and not wallowing in bad circumstances" etc. These are the kind of actions that incorporate the notion that life is ongoing. One person only realizes these in an experiential way after having access to dozens of years of memories to reflect on.
Consequentialism (and utilitarianism as well IMO) is broad enough to incorporate both the necessity of universality and the view of virtue ethics if one thinks in the timeless utility perspective.