gwern comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing

[gwern]

Allow me to summarize your argument:

′ is because an would already be doing it; is not doing , so eo ipso, is .′

It seems unlikely to me that the market is really allocating resources appropriately with regard to existential threats because of the many collective action issues.