I have the intuition that I would choose 10 hours of pain of intensity X over 1 hour of pain of intensity 10X. I’m not sure that I can justify this intuition: I suspect it might be irrational by definition, but I also suspect that many other people share this intuition. And if this in fact the case, it suggests that superlinear scaling might be a fundamental property of pain itself as opposed to an artifact of the way in which we verbalize pain on the 1 to 10 scale.
If I had more time I’d try to tease out my intuition further. At first blush I think it boils down to the idea that there is some threshold of pain to be crossed (perhaps the point at which the pain becomes “unbearable”), that is qualitatively different from any pain below that threshold in such a way that for almost any choice between y hours of the the below-the-threshold-pain and z hours of the above-the-threshold pain, I would choose the former. This probably violates basic axioms of rationality, not to mention my own generally utilitarian beliefs, but I feel the pull of the intuition nevertheless.
I have the intuition that I would choose 10 hours of pain of intensity X over 1 hour of pain of intensity 10X. I’m not sure that I can justify this intuition: I suspect it might be irrational by definition, but I also suspect that many other people share this intuition. And if this in fact the case, it suggests that superlinear scaling might be a fundamental property of pain itself as opposed to an artifact of the way in which we verbalize pain on the 1 to 10 scale.
If I had more time I’d try to tease out my intuition further. At first blush I think it boils down to the idea that there is some threshold of pain to be crossed (perhaps the point at which the pain becomes “unbearable”), that is qualitatively different from any pain below that threshold in such a way that for almost any choice between y hours of the the below-the-threshold-pain and z hours of the above-the-threshold pain, I would choose the former. This probably violates basic axioms of rationality, not to mention my own generally utilitarian beliefs, but I feel the pull of the intuition nevertheless.
It also occurs to me that my intuition is closely related to the intuition underlying the pinprick argument against negative utilitarianism: https://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html.