As a substantial portion of the population doesn’t play the game of thought experiments very well, it would be worthwhile to ask a second, unrelated thought-experiment question. Anyone who says something like “But a fat man wouldn’t weigh enough to stop a trolley!” or “You can’t keep a violinist alive by connecting them to a person!” and also doesn’t ask something like “Can I have investors bet on whether or not I will receive the $1M?” is just stupid.
Well, it just didn’t occur to me that I could make such a bet.
(Or even, I might sell the lottery ticket with an auction: someone richer than me (who would assign roughly the same utility as me to $1M but much less utility than me to smaller amounts such as $500) might buy it for a lot more money.)
If it wouldn’t have seemed to you like a decisive refutation that a fat man might not be able stop a trolley, then you’re not stupid, and didn’t immediately think of auctioning off the ticket because you understand how these things are supposed to work.
Well, I sometimes do think about non-LPCW answers to hypothetical dilemmas (though I don’t say them aloud), but in this case I didn’t even think of it. (I feel like my inclination to come up with non-LPCW answers is a function of the scenario’s plausibility, but not a monotonic one.)
As a substantial portion of the population doesn’t play the game of thought experiments very well, it would be worthwhile to ask a second, unrelated thought-experiment question. Anyone who says something like “But a fat man wouldn’t weigh enough to stop a trolley!” or “You can’t keep a violinist alive by connecting them to a person!” and also doesn’t ask something like “Can I have investors bet on whether or not I will receive the $1M?” is just stupid.
Well, it just didn’t occur to me that I could make such a bet.
(Or even, I might sell the lottery ticket with an auction: someone richer than me (who would assign roughly the same utility as me to $1M but much less utility than me to smaller amounts such as $500) might buy it for a lot more money.)
If it wouldn’t have seemed to you like a decisive refutation that a fat man might not be able stop a trolley, then you’re not stupid, and didn’t immediately think of auctioning off the ticket because you understand how these things are supposed to work.
Well, I sometimes do think about non-LPCW answers to hypothetical dilemmas (though I don’t say them aloud), but in this case I didn’t even think of it. (I feel like my inclination to come up with non-LPCW answers is a function of the scenario’s plausibility, but not a monotonic one.)