Hmm! I think the main crux of our disagreement is over “how abstract is ‘1 hour of life expectancy’?”: you view it as pretty abstract, and I view it as pretty concrete.
The reason I view it as concrete is: I equate “1 hour of life expectancy” to “1 hour spent driving,” since I mildly dislike driving. That makes it pretty concrete for me. So, if there’s a party that I’m pretty excited about, how far would I be willing to drive in order to attend? 45 minutes each way, maybe? So “a party I’m pretty excited about” is worth about 3 micromorts to me.
Does this… sound sane?
I’m in a house that budgets pretty aggressively, so, in practice, I budget, and maybe I’m wrong about how this would go; but, if I ditched budgeting entirely, and I was consistently bad at assessing tradeoffs, I would expect that I could look back after two weeks and say, “Whoa, I’ve taken on 50 life-hours of risk over the last two weeks, but I don’t think I’ve gotten 50 hours of life-satisfaction-doubling joy or utility out of seeing people. Evidently, I have a strong bias towards taking more risk than I should. I’d better retrospect on what I’ve been taking risk doing, and figure out what activities I’m overvaluing.”
Hmm! I think the main crux of our disagreement is over “how abstract is ‘1 hour of life expectancy’?”: you view it as pretty abstract, and I view it as pretty concrete.
The reason I view it as concrete is: I equate “1 hour of life expectancy” to “1 hour spent driving,” since I mildly dislike driving. That makes it pretty concrete for me. So, if there’s a party that I’m pretty excited about, how far would I be willing to drive in order to attend? 45 minutes each way, maybe? So “a party I’m pretty excited about” is worth about 3 micromorts to me.
Does this… sound sane?
I’m in a house that budgets pretty aggressively, so, in practice, I budget, and maybe I’m wrong about how this would go; but, if I ditched budgeting entirely, and I was consistently bad at assessing tradeoffs, I would expect that I could look back after two weeks and say, “Whoa, I’ve taken on 50 life-hours of risk over the last two weeks, but I don’t think I’ve gotten 50 hours of life-satisfaction-doubling joy or utility out of seeing people. Evidently, I have a strong bias towards taking more risk than I should. I’d better retrospect on what I’ve been taking risk doing, and figure out what activities I’m overvaluing.”
Or maybe I’m overestimating my own rationality!