Fwiw, at < $6000 per person that seems like a bargain to me
Possibly my intuition here comes from seeing COVID-19 risks as not too dissimilar from other risks for young people, like drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs, accidental injury in the bathroom, catching the common cold (which could have pretty bad long-term effects), kissing someone (and thereby risk getting HSV-1 or the Epstein–Barr virus), eating unhealthily, driving, living in an area with a high violent crime rate, insufficiently monitoring one’s body for cancer, etc. I don’t usually see people pay similarly large costs to avoid these risks, which naturally makes me think that people don’t actually value their time or their life as much as they say.
One possibility is that everyone would start paying more to avoid these risks if they were made more aware of them, but I’m pretty skeptical. The other possibility seems more likely to me: value of life estimates are susceptible to idealism about how much people actually value their own life and time, and so when we focus on specific risk evaluations, we tend to exaggerate.
ETA: Another possibility I didn’t mention is that rationalists are just rich. But if this is the case, then why are they even in a group house? I understand the community aspect, but living in a group house is not something rich people usually do, even highly social rich people.
Still, I think you shouldn’t ask about paying large sums of money—the utility-money curve is pretty sharply nonlinear as you get closer to 0 money, so the amount you’d pay to avoid a really bad thing is not 100x the amount you’d pay to avoid a 1% chance of that bad thing.
So the $6000 cost is averting roughly 100 micromorts (~50% of catching it from the new person * 0.02% IFR), ignoring long COVID. Most of the things you list sound like < 1 micromort-equivalent per instance? That sounds pretty consistent.
E.g. Suppose unhealthy eating knocks off ~5 years of lifespan (let’s call that 10% as bad as death, i.e. 10^5 micromorts). You have 10^3 meals a year, times about 50 years, for 5 * 10^4 meals, so each meal is roughly 2 micromorts = $120 of cost. On this model, you should see people caring about their health, but not to an extraordinary degree, e.g. after getting the first 90% of benefit, then you stop (presumably you value a tasty meal at ~$12 more than a not-tasty meal, again thinking at the margin). And empirically that seems roughly right—most of the people I know think about health, try to get good macronutrient profiles, take supplements where relevant, but they don’t go around conducting literature reviews to figure out the optimal diet to consume.
Also, I think partly you might be underestimating how risk-avoiding people at Event Horizon and my house are—I’d say both houses are well above the typical rationalist. (And also that a good number of these people are in fact rich, if we count a typical software engineer as rich.)
Another possibility I didn’t mention is that rationalists are just rich. But if this is the case, then why are they even in a group house? I understand the community aspect, but living in a group house is not something rich people usually do, even highly social rich people.
There’s a pretty big culture difference between rationalists and stereotypical rich people. One of those is living in a group house. I currently prefer a group house over a traditional you-and-your-partner house regardless of how much money I have.
Possibly my intuition here comes from seeing COVID-19 risks as not too dissimilar from other risks for young people, like drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs, accidental injury in the bathroom, catching the common cold (which could have pretty bad long-term effects), kissing someone (and thereby risk getting HSV-1 or the Epstein–Barr virus), eating unhealthily, driving, living in an area with a high violent crime rate, insufficiently monitoring one’s body for cancer, etc. I don’t usually see people pay similarly large costs to avoid these risks, which naturally makes me think that people don’t actually value their time or their life as much as they say.
One possibility is that everyone would start paying more to avoid these risks if they were made more aware of them, but I’m pretty skeptical. The other possibility seems more likely to me: value of life estimates are susceptible to idealism about how much people actually value their own life and time, and so when we focus on specific risk evaluations, we tend to exaggerate.
ETA: Another possibility I didn’t mention is that rationalists are just rich. But if this is the case, then why are they even in a group house? I understand the community aspect, but living in a group house is not something rich people usually do, even highly social rich people.
Makes sense.
So the $6000 cost is averting roughly 100 micromorts (~50% of catching it from the new person * 0.02% IFR), ignoring long COVID. Most of the things you list sound like < 1 micromort-equivalent per instance? That sounds pretty consistent.
E.g. Suppose unhealthy eating knocks off ~5 years of lifespan (let’s call that 10% as bad as death, i.e. 10^5 micromorts). You have 10^3 meals a year, times about 50 years, for 5 * 10^4 meals, so each meal is roughly 2 micromorts = $120 of cost. On this model, you should see people caring about their health, but not to an extraordinary degree, e.g. after getting the first 90% of benefit, then you stop (presumably you value a tasty meal at ~$12 more than a not-tasty meal, again thinking at the margin). And empirically that seems roughly right—most of the people I know think about health, try to get good macronutrient profiles, take supplements where relevant, but they don’t go around conducting literature reviews to figure out the optimal diet to consume.
Also, I think partly you might be underestimating how risk-avoiding people at Event Horizon and my house are—I’d say both houses are well above the typical rationalist. (And also that a good number of these people are in fact rich, if we count a typical software engineer as rich.)
There’s a pretty big culture difference between rationalists and stereotypical rich people. One of those is living in a group house. I currently prefer a group house over a traditional you-and-your-partner house regardless of how much money I have.