having an insurance policy increases the expected value of receiving a flu shot, as many insurance companies will completely cover the cost of receiving a flu shot.
That, and a little pondering why, is all you ever needed to know.
Actually estimating the utility of a vaccine is very difficult for individuals who are not complete shut-ins interacting with nobody (but then those people won’t get sick in the first place), or individuals who aren’t complete psychopaths without a job or with a job unusually resistant to damage from absence of coworkers (because even a psychopath would generally not want to get the co-workers sick). This is because a vaccine massively affects the ability of the virus to spread to other people, and in the beginning phase of the epidemic one person infects more than other person. It matters a great deal to an insurance company (or a government), so they can invest a lot of man-hours into modelling of the spread of the virus.
It is fortunate that the cost of the vaccine is so low and the illness is so common you arrive at the correct decision regardless.
It is fortunate that [...] the illness is so common you arrive at the correct decision regardless.
Yeah, it would be a pity if it diseases were less common.
(While I’m obviously overreading your use of the word “fortunate” for the sake of humor, I do wonder if there is a bias where one would prefer an objectively worse territory if one’s map would be clearer for it. And if it affects, say, decisions of doctors, or of patients.)
It was meant to be humorous. As in, with that sort of thinking, he’s lucky the flu is common enough that he’ll get a vaccine and won’t get the flu. Though I was thinking of things like measles and other anti-vaxxer fodder where precisely because of the use of the vaccine, disease risk seems very low, and it might even be in some instances the case that an agent that’s considering a very narrow scope of consequences wouldn’t vaccinate.
Another problem is that vaccines are most advantageous when everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated, but at that point it is selfishly better for everyone individually not to vaccinate. Since we don’t have identical or even similar source code, you can’t solve this by playing with the notion of consequence and pretending that most people’s decision will track yours, you have to group together and implement a policy applying to everyone.
Also by the way some governments seem to under-vaccinate (possibly for the same selfishness reasons) and it’s best to follow WHO recommendations. E.g. in my country they don’t vaccinate little kids for rotavirus, which is a condition that not only hurts the child but is so annoying for the parents that vaccinations got great pay-off—while on an individual level the pay at job may not be lower, at the country level nobody’s going to compensate for the productivity decrease from dealing with a sick child. And almost everyone gets rotavirus. More than once. And, generally if you earn more than average wage you’re probably interested in more vaccinations.
That, and a little pondering why, is all you ever needed to know.
Actually estimating the utility of a vaccine is very difficult for individuals who are not complete shut-ins interacting with nobody (but then those people won’t get sick in the first place), or individuals who aren’t complete psychopaths without a job or with a job unusually resistant to damage from absence of coworkers (because even a psychopath would generally not want to get the co-workers sick). This is because a vaccine massively affects the ability of the virus to spread to other people, and in the beginning phase of the epidemic one person infects more than other person. It matters a great deal to an insurance company (or a government), so they can invest a lot of man-hours into modelling of the spread of the virus.
It is fortunate that the cost of the vaccine is so low and the illness is so common you arrive at the correct decision regardless.
Yeah, it would be a pity if it diseases were less common.
(While I’m obviously overreading your use of the word “fortunate” for the sake of humor, I do wonder if there is a bias where one would prefer an objectively worse territory if one’s map would be clearer for it. And if it affects, say, decisions of doctors, or of patients.)
It was meant to be humorous. As in, with that sort of thinking, he’s lucky the flu is common enough that he’ll get a vaccine and won’t get the flu. Though I was thinking of things like measles and other anti-vaxxer fodder where precisely because of the use of the vaccine, disease risk seems very low, and it might even be in some instances the case that an agent that’s considering a very narrow scope of consequences wouldn’t vaccinate.
Another problem is that vaccines are most advantageous when everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated, but at that point it is selfishly better for everyone individually not to vaccinate. Since we don’t have identical or even similar source code, you can’t solve this by playing with the notion of consequence and pretending that most people’s decision will track yours, you have to group together and implement a policy applying to everyone.
Also by the way some governments seem to under-vaccinate (possibly for the same selfishness reasons) and it’s best to follow WHO recommendations. E.g. in my country they don’t vaccinate little kids for rotavirus, which is a condition that not only hurts the child but is so annoying for the parents that vaccinations got great pay-off—while on an individual level the pay at job may not be lower, at the country level nobody’s going to compensate for the productivity decrease from dealing with a sick child. And almost everyone gets rotavirus. More than once. And, generally if you earn more than average wage you’re probably interested in more vaccinations.