Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers. Though I realize that the numbers are critical to the proposition from his perspective, I think the fact that he would consider it at all probably differentiates his worldview from that of a lot of people.
"Sure, it's probable that I'm misremembering the exact numbers."
The exact number makes "the population of Earth" a tiny rounding error away from zero. Eliezer could be entirely right in his conclusion here ("core belief" is a gross mischaracterization - it follows from other things, not the other way around) and it could still be wrong to torture a man for a minute to spare dust specks in eyes of a billion Earths (and thats not even getting us much closer to the number in question).
That he would consider it at all differentiates his thinking only from those who don't think about these things. "What happens in the extreme?" is a useful question, when trying to pin down how systems work.
