Say you meet in a group of n people that all care about each other. Then, by your reasoning, each of the n people is responsible for n2 risk, so in fact (by double counting once more as in the original post), the total risk is n3. If however, we share the responsibility equally each person is responsible for n risk which is intuitive. So this quadratic growth assumption is a bit questionable, I’d like to see it done more formally because my intuition says it is not complete nonsense, but it’s obviously not the whole truth.
I feel like this is almost too obvious to state, but question is really not about the marginal risk, but about the marginal benefit. Meeting 0 people probably is really bad your mental health in comparison to meeting 2. Meeting 98 people is probably not much worse for your mental health compared to meeting 100. Meeting 2 people might be more than twice as good as meeting one. But since we don’t just care about ourselves, we should also think about the other person’s benefit. So even if you are already meeting 98 people but the 99th meets nobody else the benefit you provide to that person may (depending on your age, preconditions, etc...) be worth more than the extra bit of risk.
You are not allowed to not care for yourself. Particularly, you should take care that you are not infected, because if you are not infected you cannot spread the virus.
Sorry for the (very) late reply, but I do not understand this comment and suspect maybe my point didn’t come accross clearly, cf. also my other reply to the comment below this one.
Apologies for the really late reply, but I don’t think “marginal risk” in this context is well-defined. The marginal risk to yourself grows linearly in the number of people to first order. You could feel responsible for the marginal risk to all the other party goers, but they are people with their own agency, you aren’t (in my opinion) responsible for managing their risk.
Say you meet in a group of n people that all care about each other. Then, by your reasoning, each of the n people is responsible for n2 risk, so in fact (by double counting once more as in the original post), the total risk is n3. If however, we share the responsibility equally each person is responsible for n risk which is intuitive. So this quadratic growth assumption is a bit questionable, I’d like to see it done more formally because my intuition says it is not complete nonsense, but it’s obviously not the whole truth.
I feel like this is almost too obvious to state, but question is really not about the marginal risk, but about the marginal benefit. Meeting 0 people probably is really bad your mental health in comparison to meeting 2. Meeting 98 people is probably not much worse for your mental health compared to meeting 100. Meeting 2 people might be more than twice as good as meeting one. But since we don’t just care about ourselves, we should also think about the other person’s benefit. So even if you are already meeting 98 people but the 99th meets nobody else the benefit you provide to that person may (depending on your age, preconditions, etc...) be worth more than the extra bit of risk.
You are not allowed to not care for yourself. Particularly, you should take care that you are not infected, because if you are not infected you cannot spread the virus.
Sorry for the (very) late reply, but I do not understand this comment and suspect maybe my point didn’t come accross clearly, cf. also my other reply to the comment below this one.
If you’re deciding whether or not to add the (n+1)th person, what matters is the marginal risk of that decision.
Apologies for the really late reply, but I don’t think “marginal risk” in this context is well-defined. The marginal risk to yourself grows linearly in the number of people to first order. You could feel responsible for the marginal risk to all the other party goers, but they are people with their own agency, you aren’t (in my opinion) responsible for managing their risk.