Imagine I were a ship captain assigned to try to If rescue a viable sample of a culture from a zone that was about to be genocided, I would be very likely to take the 400 peopleweights (including books or whatever else they valued as much as people) of evacuees, unless someone made a convincing case that the extra 100 people were vital cultural or genetic carriers. For definiteness, imagine my ship is rated to carry up to 400 peopleweight worth of passengers in almost any weather, but 500 people would overload it to the point of sinking during a storm of the sort that the weather experts predict 10 percent probable during voyage to safe harbor.
People are not dollars or bales of cotton to be sold at market. You can’t just count heads and multiply that number by utilons per head and say “This answer is best, any other answer is foolish.”
Well obviously you can do that, but the main reward for doing so is the feeling that you are smarter than the poor dumb fools who believe that the world is complex and situation dependent. That is, you can give yourself a sort of warm fuzzy feeling of smug superiority by defeating the straw man you constructed as your foolish competitor in the Intelligence Sweepstakes.
That being said, if there really is no other information available, I would take the same choice Eliezer recommends; I just deny that it is the only non foolish choice.
This applies to lottery tickets as well. A slim chance at escaping economic hell might be worth more than its nominal expected return value to a given individual. 100 million dollars might very well have a personal utility over a billion times the value of one dollar for example, if that person’s deep goals would be facilitated mightily by the big win and not at all by a single dollar or any reasonable number of dollars they might expect to save over the available time. Also, if any entertainment dollar is not a foolish waste, then a dollar spent on a lottery ticket is worth its expected winning value plus its entertainment value, which varies /profoundly/ from person to person.
I myself prefer to give people $1 lottery tickets instead of $2.95 witty birthday cards. Am I wise or foolish in this? But posts here have branded all lottery purchases as foolish, so I must be a fool. I bow to the collective wisdom here and admit that I am a fool. There is a lot of other evidence that supports this conclusion :)
if you give yourself over to rationality without holding back, you will find that rationality gives to you in return.
I heartily agree, that’s one reason I try to avoid trotting out applause lights to trigger other people into giving me warm fuzzies.
I am happy for one person to be tortured for 50 years to stave off the dust specks, as long as that person is me. In fact, this pretty much sums up my career in software development, it is not my favorite thing to do but I endured cubicle hell for many years in exchange for money in part, but also because of my deep belief that solving annoying little bugs and glitches that might inconvenience many many people was an activity important enough to override my personal preferences; I could easily have found other combinations of pay and fun that pleased me better, so I have actually been through this dilemma in muted form in real life and chose to personally suffer to hold off ‘specks’ like poorly designed user interfaces.
I do have great admiration for Eliezer but he claims to want to be more rational and to welcome criticism intended to promote his progress on The Way, so I thought it would be ok to be critical of this post, which irked me because paragraph four is a straw man “fool” phrased in second person, which seems like a sort of pre-emptive ad hominem against any reader of the post foolish enough to disagree with the premise of the writer. This seems like an extremely poor substitute for rational discourse, the sort of nonsense that could cost the writer Quirrell points, and none of us want that. I don’t want to seem hostile, but since I am exactly the sort of fool who disagreed with the premise of paragraph 3, I do feel like I was being flamed a bit, and since I am apparently made of straw, flames make me nervous :)
I myself prefer to give people $1 lottery tickets instead of $2.95 witty birthday cards. Am I wise or foolish in this? But posts here have branded all lottery purchases as foolish, so I must be a fool.
The foolish thing is to consider those two options the only choices.
I myself prefer to give people $1 lottery tickets instead of $2.95 witty birthday cards. Am I wise or foolish in this?
You are foolish in this.
Birthday cards show that you specifically thought of someone’s birthday and are celebrating it. Giving them something generic, regardless of value, doesn’t serve the same purpose as a birthday card. By your reasoning you could not only substitute lottery tickets for birthday cards, you could substitute lottery tickets for saying the words “happy birthday” as well, thus never wishing them a happy birthday either.
Furthermore, since the lottery ticket is cheaper than the birthday card, and everyone knows this, and (apparently) this cheapness is one of your reasons for doing this, you are violating social expectations about when it is acceptable to be obviously cheap. (You can still be cheap, but you can’t be obviously cheap about it.)
It depends on the actual situation and my goal.
Imagine I were a ship captain assigned to try to If rescue a viable sample of a culture from a zone that was about to be genocided, I would be very likely to take the 400 peopleweights (including books or whatever else they valued as much as people) of evacuees, unless someone made a convincing case that the extra 100 people were vital cultural or genetic carriers. For definiteness, imagine my ship is rated to carry up to 400 peopleweight worth of passengers in almost any weather, but 500 people would overload it to the point of sinking during a storm of the sort that the weather experts predict 10 percent probable during voyage to safe harbor.
People are not dollars or bales of cotton to be sold at market. You can’t just count heads and multiply that number by utilons per head and say “This answer is best, any other answer is foolish.”
Well obviously you can do that, but the main reward for doing so is the feeling that you are smarter than the poor dumb fools who believe that the world is complex and situation dependent. That is, you can give yourself a sort of warm fuzzy feeling of smug superiority by defeating the straw man you constructed as your foolish competitor in the Intelligence Sweepstakes.
That being said, if there really is no other information available, I would take the same choice Eliezer recommends; I just deny that it is the only non foolish choice.
This applies to lottery tickets as well. A slim chance at escaping economic hell might be worth more than its nominal expected return value to a given individual. 100 million dollars might very well have a personal utility over a billion times the value of one dollar for example, if that person’s deep goals would be facilitated mightily by the big win and not at all by a single dollar or any reasonable number of dollars they might expect to save over the available time. Also, if any entertainment dollar is not a foolish waste, then a dollar spent on a lottery ticket is worth its expected winning value plus its entertainment value, which varies /profoundly/ from person to person.
I myself prefer to give people $1 lottery tickets instead of $2.95 witty birthday cards. Am I wise or foolish in this? But posts here have branded all lottery purchases as foolish, so I must be a fool. I bow to the collective wisdom here and admit that I am a fool. There is a lot of other evidence that supports this conclusion :)
I heartily agree, that’s one reason I try to avoid trotting out applause lights to trigger other people into giving me warm fuzzies.
I am happy for one person to be tortured for 50 years to stave off the dust specks, as long as that person is me. In fact, this pretty much sums up my career in software development, it is not my favorite thing to do but I endured cubicle hell for many years in exchange for money in part, but also because of my deep belief that solving annoying little bugs and glitches that might inconvenience many many people was an activity important enough to override my personal preferences; I could easily have found other combinations of pay and fun that pleased me better, so I have actually been through this dilemma in muted form in real life and chose to personally suffer to hold off ‘specks’ like poorly designed user interfaces.
I do have great admiration for Eliezer but he claims to want to be more rational and to welcome criticism intended to promote his progress on The Way, so I thought it would be ok to be critical of this post, which irked me because paragraph four is a straw man “fool” phrased in second person, which seems like a sort of pre-emptive ad hominem against any reader of the post foolish enough to disagree with the premise of the writer. This seems like an extremely poor substitute for rational discourse, the sort of nonsense that could cost the writer Quirrell points, and none of us want that. I don’t want to seem hostile, but since I am exactly the sort of fool who disagreed with the premise of paragraph 3, I do feel like I was being flamed a bit, and since I am apparently made of straw, flames make me nervous :)
The foolish thing is to consider those two options the only choices.
You are foolish in this.
Birthday cards show that you specifically thought of someone’s birthday and are celebrating it. Giving them something generic, regardless of value, doesn’t serve the same purpose as a birthday card. By your reasoning you could not only substitute lottery tickets for birthday cards, you could substitute lottery tickets for saying the words “happy birthday” as well, thus never wishing them a happy birthday either.
Furthermore, since the lottery ticket is cheaper than the birthday card, and everyone knows this, and (apparently) this cheapness is one of your reasons for doing this, you are violating social expectations about when it is acceptable to be obviously cheap. (You can still be cheap, but you can’t be obviously cheap about it.)