Thanks, Bruce! Makes sense. I have now clarified in the post that the guesses for the pain intensities come from my personal time trade-offs:
My assumptions for the pain intensities are guesses for my personal time trade-offs, and imply each of the following individually neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life:
Nope! I would rather give up 1 day of healthy life than 86 seconds of this description. But this varies depending on the timeframe in question.
For example, I’d probably be willing to endure 0.86 seconds of this for 14 minutes of healthy life, and I would definitely endure 0.086 seconds of this than give up 86 seconds of healthy life.
0.1 s of excruciating pain intuitively passes very quickly, so I can easily imagine it being less than 100 times as bad as 10 s (= 0.1*100) of excruciating pain. However, I think intuitions like this are misguided holding the intensity of pain constant (i.e. only varying duration). For example, if 1 min in strong pain is 100 times as bad as 1 min in weak pain, and strong and weak pain have each a constant intensity (instead of referring to ranges of intensities), N min in strong pain should be 100 times as bad as N min in weak pain. Saying otherwise implies that the badness of 1 min in strong pain depends on how many minutes of strong pain preceded that 1 min, which contradicts the assumption that strong pain has a constant intensity.
I think 0.1 s of excruciating pain does not feel bad because one wrongly imagines the memory of the pain afterwards, which may not be so bad because 0.1 s is too little time to form memories. In addition, one may imagine that some time is needed to reach the intensity of excruciating pain, such that only a small fraction of the 0.1 s are actually excruciating pain, but the thought experiment requires 0.1 s of actual excruciating pain.
Thanks, Bruce! Makes sense. I have now clarified in the post that the guesses for the pain intensities come from my personal time trade-offs:
0.1 s of excruciating pain intuitively passes very quickly, so I can easily imagine it being less than 100 times as bad as 10 s (= 0.1*100) of excruciating pain. However, I think intuitions like this are misguided holding the intensity of pain constant (i.e. only varying duration). For example, if 1 min in strong pain is 100 times as bad as 1 min in weak pain, and strong and weak pain have each a constant intensity (instead of referring to ranges of intensities), N min in strong pain should be 100 times as bad as N min in weak pain. Saying otherwise implies that the badness of 1 min in strong pain depends on how many minutes of strong pain preceded that 1 min, which contradicts the assumption that strong pain has a constant intensity.
I think 0.1 s of excruciating pain does not feel bad because one wrongly imagines the memory of the pain afterwards, which may not be so bad because 0.1 s is too little time to form memories. In addition, one may imagine that some time is needed to reach the intensity of excruciating pain, such that only a small fraction of the 0.1 s are actually excruciating pain, but the thought experiment requires 0.1 s of actual excruciating pain.