I think another problem with the hypothetical is scope insensitive.
I mean I read 10 trillions usd and feel no difference from 10 millions usd or less.
And it is unclear whether 10 millions is worth 10 of my fingers, while intellectually I think 10 trillions supposed to be worth it. Hence the discomfort.
I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.
I don’t intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.
I don’t intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.
Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire.
Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.
I think another problem with the hypothetical is scope insensitive. I mean I read 10 trillions usd and feel no difference from 10 millions usd or less. And it is unclear whether 10 millions is worth 10 of my fingers, while intellectually I think 10 trillions supposed to be worth it. Hence the discomfort.
I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.
I don’t intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.
I don’t intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.
Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire.
Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.