David T

Karma: 1,495

David T 2 Jun 2026 23:17 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Will we really put data centers in space?
The full report is definitely one of the better treatments I’ve seen of the subject (and I’ve read quite a few recently as they’re loosely related to my work). A few comments though...
- Feels like an unduly favourable assumption to ODCs to amortise hardware over exactly the same schedule as terrestrial ones. Any situation in which inference compute hardware doesn’t become obsolete at exactly the point the ODC reaches end of design life favours terrestrial datacentres.^[1] Also feels generous to assume bleed rates in space are no worse than terrestrial bleed^[2]
- I’m not sure what model you’ve determined your satellite hardware costs on and I know you’ve itemised solar and radiator panels else where, but taking the most feasible approach of thousands of smallsats for your 1GW datacentre, the $4b is buying a lot of propulsion systems, GNC subsystems, intersatellite links, space rated batteries and MAIT work as well as aluminium frames^[3]. The article doesn’t really discuss how much more complex satellite buses are than modular buildings...
- I think the regulatory arguments actually mostly stack in favour of terrestrial datacentres, because you get to jurisdiction shop. Whilst space isn’t effectively regulated, spectrum and launch licensing is and you basically only have one choice.^[4] There’s growing concern over orbital congestion and even the effects of deorbiting on the mesosphere to deal with, and plenty of parts of the world where NIMBYs either don’t live or are less relevant to local regulators than your money.
- The cooling estimate for earth may or may not be representative of what people are paying for climate control for racks of servers in a building, but feels a lot easier to improve that than max out the specific power of satellite radiators, especially since for ODCs we’ve already relaxed design principles like “chips should be less than 1km away from each other!”.
So I agree with the overall point it’s going to depend a lot on launch costs but I think there’s still some way to go. And even if the unit economics do work, your “fast takeoff” approach with Starship launches scaling to 10k by 2028 feels very fast assuming no obstacles at all to development, scaling capacity or even launches scrubbed by weather. c.f. industry expectations that Blue Origin losing their only launchpad recently will set them back a full year. SpaceX’s launch cadence being exceptional feels like reason to doubt they’ll 50x it in the next 2 years with an experimental platform...
A couple of further points slightly more favourable to ODCs in the longer run
- costs look different if one assumes a architecture where much of the mass doesn’t get deorbited every five years (especially stuff which suffers minimal degradation like radiators) ^[5] which probably looks a bit more like Starcloud plus orbital refuelling and servicer vehicles to upgrade chips. That sort of modular architecture is still a work in progress and obviously has its own tradeoffs with more expensive components.
- the other use case for orbital datacentres is edge compute for military uses, which isn’t fully defined yet and isn’t nearly as price sensitive
1. ^
  Your terrestrial datacentre can keep on running if its 5 year old chips are still useful, or conversely be replaced much earlier if the economics favours keeping the building/microgrid but replacing the chips with much better ones. Obsolete chips potentially have some resale market too. Your ODC needs deorbiting after 5 years regardless; propellant refuelling and in space chip replacement are theoretically possible but orders of magnitude more expensive than keeping a building powered on.
2. ^
  we have some evidence of COTS inference chips surviving 5yr LEO radiation doses without issue, but might be a different matter for the marginal chip whilst running hot over a 5 year duration in that environment. If needed, radiation hardened variants could be delivered… for a price
3. ^
  if I understand correctly that’s supposed to be just $4 per watt bus/subsystem/MAIT costs excluding solar panels, radiators and inference chips which would be two orders of magnitude cheaper than competitive providers in today’s market. Even with the benefits of vertical integration and automation that seems ambitious for the near term...
4. ^
  I suppose you could pin your hopes on Europe or India improving launch cadence and offering less restrictive licensing regimes but that sounds unlikely...
5. ^
  one reason why some people manage to be both sceptical of ODCs and bullish on SBSP (which has similar pros and cons) is that the latter is supposed to amortise its build costs over decades rather than be replaced every 5 years, which offsets transmission efficiency loss. Though yeah, that does mean more expensive solar panels etc...
6. ^
  I don’t know how much very slight latency between different nodes or sporadic disruption affects inference compute, but feels like something that could be more of a problem than precision pointing and tracking (these are solved problems, albeit problems solved with more expensive hardware and mission ops and regulators might not like dense formations)

David T 16 May 2026 10:38 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grantmakers
If accurate, that ratio of grantmakers to employed specialists looks rather low compared with what I understand it to be in many other fields, and I’m thinking of fields like space technology which have 75 page grant applications requiring specialist knowledge to evaluate and monitor, and government subsidy programmes whose application volume is sufficiently high to have <5% funding rates and which have painful audit requirements.
Also wonder how much EA organizations use part time external reviewers to evaluate grants, which is the standard way of broadening evaluations and removing bottlenecks? (although I can see getting AI specialists who both work in industry/research and are truly independent might be more challenging)

David T 13 May 2026 17:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: We don’t know why Malawi is poor — and what that means for AI-and-growth forecasts
tbf it looks like the categories that drag Malawi’s economy down are the trade restrictions which were discussed and lack of “sound money”: inflation is often a symptom of being poor^[1] rather than anything particularly unusual about its institutions.
Even more so if we compare institutions with Botswana and its relative wealth from being able to export diamonds rather than basic food.
1. ^
  productivity growth locally not keeping up with the cost of necessary imports, basically. Looks like Malawi de-pegged their economy from the dollar a while back because of balance of payment problems rather than because of some weird governmental quirk.

David T 12 May 2026 22:05 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: We don’t know why Malawi is poor — and what that means for AI-and-growth forecasts
I think you make a good point well (although I think the answer to why Malawi is poor is “all of the above and more”, and the question “why is Rwanda growing fast” is a more interesting one^[1])
When it comes to the inability of A[G]I to magically transform Malawi’s economy I actually think it’s even broader than just specific things like the existing political settlement restricting exports: AI telling people how to increase crop yields simply isn’t going to make maize smallholding anything other than a poverty living. Demand for maize is finite so making it marginally more efficiently even if one assumes every Malawian smallholder perfectly optimizes their production using the latest frontier yield optimization models (which one definitely shouldn’t assume) makes little difference. AI isn’t going to make the world any more likely to manufacture in a poorly educated, poorly connected backwater; if anything the opposite. Malawians aren’t exactly inundated with funds to buy compute time to start exciting new international businesses either.
1. ^
  Bangladesh and Vietnam I don’t see as really comparable. They have some classic historic problems but they have factors pulling them into a global economy Malawi doesn’t and couldn’t have.

David T 11 May 2026 20:56 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Arno’s comment on: Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid
On paper the absolute perfect people to do this are the diaspora: people who are both sufficiently familiar with local languages and cultural norms and challenges and sufficiently Westernized to be good at dealing with Western consumers and importers and funders.

Obviously some are doing this, just wondering if there’s much [Western] support infrastructure to help people trying to get into it?

David T 8 May 2026 8:45 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Berke’s comment on: Effective Altruism focused on bednets while a malaria vaccine was stuck for 35 years. The case for Abundance.
The vaccine acceleration has some nuance as well. It’s definitely not as simple as “people could have produced enough vaccines to end malaria if the silly people slowing things down didn’t get in the way”. RTS’S, whilst moderately effective at reducing deaths in infants until the effects wear off never had the potential to get remotely close to ending malaria, and has been estimated to be less cost-effective at saving lives than plain old bednets.^[1] Ideally, of course, kids in the most affected areas would have both and probably seasonal chemoprevention too, but we haven’t even funded comprehensive enough bednet distribution yet.

Also these particular decisions don’t get taken by people who are sceptical of the potential of science or who lack skill in number crunching—quite the opposite. The Phase III trials had a further followup very large trial rather than instant mass distribution as soon as it was declared efficacious and probably safe because spending large fractions of developing countries’ healthcare budget on a promising intervention that appeared to work well in some groups but not others is a difficult thing to do.^[2] It’s not like adopting the opposite approach doesn’t have its drawbacks: the COVID vaccines were about as effective and safe as could be possibly have been hoped for in the accelerated timescale they were released on, but still ended up with the indirect result of US medicine being coopted by radical antivaxxers^[3] which seems bad, as does more parents withdrawing their kids from once routine vaccination schedules. Could have been a lot worse if those rare myocarditis side effects people spotted late on weren’t rarer than myocarditis side effects from the COVID everyone was getting anyway. It’s easier to say more, bigger, faster without considering second order effects.
1. ^
  see for example https://www.1daysooner.org/how-cost-effective-is-the-new-r21-vaccine-compared-to-existing-malaria-interventions/ and note that these have wide error bars due to the differences in costs of vaccination programs between countries and uncertainty about how consistently bednets are used, and that R21 which got faster regulatory approval is more cost effective because it appears more potent and is cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
2. ^
  it wasn’t just the overlapping but probably completely coincidental meningitis, there were quirks in the Phase III trial data probably related to the relatively small sample size like the rare but most-likely-to-be-fatal cerebral malaria actually showing up more in vaccinated older kids which brought recommendations for a very large trial rather than universal incorporation into everyone’s vaccine schedule.
3. ^
  Trump moves in mysterious ways, but his decision to appoint RFK Jr to attack vaccine science surely isn’t unlinked to how the fact the one Trump achievement he can get booed by his own supporters for mentioning is vaccine rollout, after the narrative everyone was being injected before the scientists even knew what the side effects were took hold.

David T 7 May 2026 22:13 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
It’s an interesting idea but as expressed feels a little tendentious, particularly if one looks at what is actually formally considered a war crime these days (much of which would not have been recognised as war crimes in the past, including by actors who believed themselves to be unusually chivalrous). Hard to believe it will be impossible to avoid total war if a few civilians are murdered or chemical weapons are used, never mind if a pilot gets shot after ejecting or if a spy is not afforded a fair trial, and hostage taking was once considered a good way to avoid total war. We see peace agreements between prolific war criminals quite often too. Avoiding total war might be a motivation, but it can’t be the only one.
On the other hand game theory favours opposing sides agreeing to not shoot ejecting pilots or torture each others’ prisoners even if they don’t agree on anything else, whereas it is impossible to win a war if you are not permitted to fire at the other side’s soldiers, and at least in 1949 artillery and aerial bombardments were also too critical to winning for the Geneva Convention to agree to ban them. It is possible for opposing sides to agree not to shoot at people that don’t wear uniform, but only if both sides treat sneaking up on the other side and shooting them whilst not wearing uniform as also a crime.
Also, many people genuinely believe in the idea that people shooting other people in a uniform which indicates they intend to fire back represents some sort of fair play (even if the targets happen to be sleeping conscripts who haven’t had a chance to surrender yet) and the sort of people that believe in that sort of thing are disproportionately likely to be military officers. They tend to believe in just wars too...
I do agree that opposing sides are considerably more likely to respect conventions on war crimes (and even reach other bargains like prisoner swaps) whilst the infrastructure that may allow the sides to mutually end the war still exists. But there’s plenty of evidence of war crimes committed with impunity in conflicts that never came close to total war, and for that matter of individual military units choosing to abide by conventions despite there being no realistic prospect of a near-term peace agreement and plenty of war crimes being committed by others on their side

David T 7 May 2026 19:34 UTC
7 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: New EA Forum LLM-use policy
I would add that whilst I understand non-native speakers wanting to use LLMs to write more idiomatic English, I would rather read their own thoughts with a few grammar errors and unusual word choices than their own thoughts mixed up with vaguely similar ideas that aren’t theirs and pithy summaries that are actually expressing something different...

David T 6 May 2026 21:29 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Goodmaxxing
I like the idea of goodmaxxing but feel like I am wayyy to old to know how seriously the sort of youngster that watches videos with maxxing in the title would take this blog :)

David T 27 Apr 2026 21:42 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
Interesting point, and I suspect that there are lower hanging fruit in gambling too: some of the most addictive forms (e.g. fixed odds betting terminals in the UK) are not some intrinsic part of the culture but relatively new innovations promoted by a mere handful of companies and so regulators are much happier grappling with them (in the case of fixed odds betting terminals, I suspect restrictions on how much could be bet per spin were even more popular with the people who actually use them on a regular basis than the wider public!).
In that respect it’s perhaps a lot like animal rights activism requires campaigns focused on winnable battles to be effective (and it might appeal to some people that already have that lobbying skillset)

David T 26 Apr 2026 11:37 UTC
15 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
I tend to agree with the OP, but think there are a couple of other points about subsidising prediction markets which could have had more emphasis
- Forecasts are a market in which people trade money, which makes it easy for them to function on a for profit model if there is significant interest in participation. Even if prediction markets are objectively highly valuable, it is not clear there is sufficient altruism-relevant benefit in forecasting quality coming from subsidised rather than non-subsidised platforms to justify the subsidy ^[1]
- Forecasting for profit is zero sum,^[2] which means every superforecaster is balanced out by an equal and opposite amount of money collectively lost by others who are less “well calibrated”. Many people are perhaps happy to net lose money gambled for entertainment or signalling purposes (though perhaps they could part with their cash in other ways which deliver more positive outcomes...), but others may be developing gambling habits which can be extremely self destructive^[3]. I guess this links to Marcus’ “feels like doing something useful where it isn’t” point, but it can be much worse than simply a distraction. Negative externalities can be significant, and it is unclear if the positive externalities outweigh them.
1. ^
  I guess without a platform cut/spread you get marginally more precision, but how many forecasts actually need that precision and are sufficiently liquid to get it?
2. ^
  actually worse than zero sum on a for-profit exchange, obviously...
3. ^
  many forms of traditional gambling relies heavily on “whales” with a mixture of non trivial amounts of money to lose and impulse control problems for much of their volume and profit; some of them ruin their lives doing so, even more so the people with the same impulse control problems and less starting money. This may not apply to niche prediction markets, but I’m sure people can become addicted to the idea of winning their money back even if they know casino “betting systems” are -EV and don’t like sports or machines with flashing lights

David T 25 Apr 2026 16:53 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Guy Raveh’s Quick takes
Presumably CEA did some sort of estimate of utilization and operational costs to justify the funding bar; the decision to shutter it fairly early based on cost benefit analysis suggests that those estimates proved optimistic. It would be interesting to see how much they missed by, and whether they factored alternatives like hosting at the local university into either of the assessments.
The venue selection process between 3 publicly listed and immediately available properties in the range £6-£15m sounds rather trivial as described considering the expense, particularly in a culture which encourages rigorous analysis of the relative effectiveness of much smaller donations.

David T 24 Apr 2026 14:59 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Guy Raveh’s Quick takes
It’s a niche property with very few potential buyers and they probably overpaid. The UK property market has cooled a little and isn’t necessarily as attractive to the sort of oligarch or hospitality company most likely to buy it. It will also have a very high annual maintenance bill due to its age; it’s possible they found more work which needed doing which hit the value and hanging onto it would have had a non-trivial cost regardless. It’s also possible they clawed some money back from selling off some parts separately (there was an apartment in a Wytham Abbey outbuilding for sale last year, though I’m not sure EA ever owned that building).

It’s not particularly unusual for buyers of niche high value property to make large losses when under a little pressure to sell, especially if they bought into the property’s sentimental appeal rather than its costs. The people that very confidently dismissed the idea that Wytham would be a losing venture because don’t you guys know what a capital investment is understood the market dynamics and operational costs less well than many of the critics.
I mean, if you want to buy up a pretty hotel with a bus service to Oxford, you can get more bedrooms for less money than Wytham was sold for, never mind what it was bought for https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/739022765321024#/?channel=COM_BUY

David T 22 Apr 2026 20:58 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: List of my Favorite Named Adages, Aphorisms, Dictums, Laws, Maxims, and Rules to Live By
What’s labelled Asimov’s Corollary here is actually Parkinson’s Law
Asimov’s Corollary, which is pretty neat but completely different and not nearly as pithy, is explained here. As a fan of Clarke’s laws, I’m sure Peter likes that one too.

-

I also haven’t seen or heard anyone refer to Mandelson’s law before? Although the quote is certainly ironic in the context of UK politics (Peter Mandelson is a political figure in the headlines for his third resignation in disgrace having been brought back into the fold 25 years after his last one; the struggling Prime Minister is probably sick of trying to explain his appointment to an unreceptive public by now....)

David T 22 Apr 2026 19:16 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mihkel Viires 🔹’s comment on: Mihkel Viires ’s Quick takes
It also feels like smugglers helping regular smokers get discounts on their habit are the wrong model, since the target for the ban is young people who generally don’t [yet]have a smoking addiction. Basically everyone else buys cigarettes legally in convenience stores and teenagers already barely smoke them with the trend being steeply downwards since the turn of the century. Kids who don’t have a smoking habit and increasingly aren’t interested in trying are barely a demand factor for underground cigarettes, especially since they can also obtain them by asking an older person to purchase it in a regular convenience store, same as 15 year olds wanting to experiment with cigarettes and alcohol have done for years. .
It’s just it places more of a barrier to them getting it regularly in quantities likely to become habit-forming, and ultimately apart from being highly addictive when people do that tobacco doesn’t have much appeal as a drug, offering minimal high and being something grandma smokes and teen idols don’t, so it really doesn’t seem like something that a few years down the line is going to result in speakeasies full of chainsmoking twentysomethings or a new sideline for dealers in cocaine.

David T 22 Apr 2026 17:46 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Cullen_OKeefe’s Shortform
I can understand that prediction markets trending towards sports gambling was overlooked by the sort of people who (i) were arguing about the creation of new markets for stuff that didn’t already have an abundance of well-marketed gambling options and (ii) generally weren’t personally interested in betting on sports.
But lack of debate at the time about preying on people with weak impulse control surprises me, given that prediction markets are by design zero-sum games (like binary options trades, which have long been dominated by boiler room outfits preying on people with weak impulse control, and are regulated equivalently to sports gambling in many jurisdictions) rather than trades between entities with different liquidity needs or risk tolerance. Even if (or especially if) some of the market participants are superforecasters whose data-driven approach makes their assessments worth paying attention to, they still need punters to win money off and most bets offered simply aren’t a good hedge for anything.

David T 21 Apr 2026 21:48 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why is it so hard to convince people of EA?
Think this is a good post. But the specific example below feels like so much of a mischaracterization of typical debate it might actually illustrate part of the problem.
The problem with many of the naive objections to EA is that they are not matters of opinion. A favorite objection of the uninitiated is “but how can you KNOW that doing X is better than doing Y? I don’t think it’s possible to know, so you can choose arbitrarily between X and Y.” It is not a matter of opinion, for example, that giving $50,000 to train a single seeing eye dog is less effective at combating blindness than curing literally 1,000 people of cataracts.
Whilst you may have experienced specific counterexamples, I think relatively few objectors to EA are questioning the principle that restoring the sight of 1000 people might plausibly be agreed to be a preferable outcome to moderately aiding one blind person^[1] as opposed to generalising from this to what EA actually is, which is a much bolder set of claims and priorities than “sometimes you can help more people achieve the same ends with the same amount of money”
tbh even if they are explicitly asking an EA to state something as fundamental as how they can treat helping 1000 blind people > 1 blind person as established fact, if they’re someone who’s ever had a conversation with an EA before there’s a decent chance they’re doing so to ward off the EA promptly substituting 2000 chickens or ~~priors~~ convenient imputed probability claims into the equation! And, in general, I think people asking why EA is so convinced it’s so much better at prioritising and insisting philanthropic choices are arbitrary aren’t doing so because they don’t think cost benefit analysis can be done in any circumstances^[2] they’re asking because of how many other assumptions are necessarily smuggled in to even attempt cause neutrality (or because they think the assumptions smuggled in are wrong,^[3] or just not actually that neutral).
Obviously this isn’t because EAs refuse to debate their assumptions at all. Indeed they love nothing more than respectful debate with people who like to state their own priors and utility ranges, and even someone questioning the validity of the whole EA utilitarian consequentialist framework might get entertained so long as they establish themselves as being suitably intellectual if they contextualise it by explaining their own ethical framework first. But there’s a strong tendency to assume that if people don’t come armed with the right jargon and specific alternatives or at least have the decency to state that their question is axiological they must just not understand anything, or actually reject the whole edifice of science.^[4] I think even when delivered without a hint of condescension that sort of talking past people is more annoying than the bluntness^[5]
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Similarly I don’t think advising people midway through medical school to retrain as AI researchers is a form of fanaticism which is just unrealistic enough to be annoying (though it’s an excellent example of unrealistic enough to be annoying fanaticism). It’s also a fundamental error based on evaluating outsider professions differently from the recommended ones: completely forgetting that if we’re dismissing the impact of choosing to become a doctor by comparing them with the counterfactual of the next best applicant like 80k hours says, we should we should treat the impact of the alternative career the same way. Which means the impact of a couple of medical students career changing to the even more competitive profession of AI safety should be measured by how much more likely they are to solve AI alignment than the multiple CompSci graduates who’ve been obsessing over it for five years applying for the same positions. Even if they somehow find a job in that field they’re unlikely to tangibly change it^[6]. It’s not just the fanaticism producing recommendations that are annoying or too late, it’s also that cargo culting the arguments produces recommendations that are plain bad.^[7]
1. ^
  There are obviously also explicit arguments for preferring to help one person over 1000s far away based on axiological assumptions about duty to particular communities or individuals, but yeah, those arguments don’t tend to be made implicitly in the form of a question....
2. ^
  again, people (including EAs) sometimes have arguments against the applying it to particular fields and evidence bases which are really good but they tend to explicitly make them
3. ^
  there are lots of epistemological questions about recommendations that have a better answer than “don’t you know the difference between opinion and fact?” too: the better EA analyses are explicit about their evidence base and the extent to which it represents a knowledge claim and their level of confidence X actually does deliver Z more cost effectively than Y
4. ^
  I’m not saying bad questions don’t exist, I’m saying that reasonable ones often get framed as unreasonable ones because lecturing people about how cost benefit analysis is just maths and they surely aren’t arguing with maths is easier than justifying the use of “moral weights”
5. ^
  tbh online at least I think EA’s style of debate is more likely to be accused—fairly and otherwise—of annoyingly polite persistence
6. ^
  nor will the modal AI researcher...
7. ^
  tbf the other default EA recommendation of doing medical research instead probably isn’t a bad suggestion in this instance. Or maybe they should study how to use AI to do medical research to make everyone happy ;)

David T 21 Apr 2026 19:55 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Junior people should apply to things that they won’t get.
I think the main benefit of applying to jobs you don’t think you’ll get remains the possibility you might actually get them.
If you’re applying for feedback you’ll usually be disappointed though. Most organizations offer little feedback due to a mix of caution, other things to do and the tendency of “honestly you were pretty OK, the other candidates just stood out as better in a mix of different ways” to be the actual answer, which isn’t really actionable.

David T 21 Apr 2026 19:36 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: alexfogelson’s comment on: Against Credulous AI Hype
Credulous really is the right word. There is a strand of dialogue in EA circles that feels like “we called much of this many years ago” therefor “everything that transpires will mimic our thought experiments perfectly.” The marketing from frontier labs is the offspring of early EA/LW ideas. The potential for confirmation bias here is astronomical.
I also think that when it comes to assessing whether they’re overly trusting of the claims of frontier labs because it fits their broader views, it’s probably more relevant that EAs generally believed Altman and Musk when they said they were founding OpenAI to do philanthropic research when basically everybody else understood what they were really trying to do than that EAs correctly called transformers being a big deal when the average computer scientist was a bit more cautious.
GPT2 was “too dangerous to release” as a marketing strategy too.

David T 9 Apr 2026 17:17 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture
I think human responses to pain are more complex than just thresholds too. In addition to your gentle scratching, or the near-zero amount of pain sensations registered when applauding, humans voluntarily inflict non-trivial amounts of pain upon themselves for entertainment and self-worth, and accept inevitability of pain as part of their hobbies. Is it meaningful to argue that a certain number of tattoo artists is more objectionable than a smaller number of puppy kickers, or that selecting someone to play football for 90 minutes which will aggravate their modest limb pain is morally more dubious than intentionally kicking them on that limb? I don’t think so.
And that’s not to mention the benefits of pain which such discussions ignore. For many millenia, one of the most feared diseases was leprosy, which manifests itself in numbness.
When it gets to complex organisms and torture much of it is measured as psychological responses rather than intensity of nervous sensation too, which also doesn’t align well with a neat cardinal pain scale; techniques like waterboarding actually trigger objectively useful reflexes rather than inflicting neurological pain. Is there a certain amount of cumulative experience of unexpected droplets in the nasal system aggregated across many people that approximates a single instance of waterboarding one individual? I would say no. I’d probably also say that there isn’t a certain amount of aggregated BSDM kink that’s worse than one actual torture chamber...