even the narrow “nuclear wars are unpleasant to survive, and we should discount preparations accordingly” is fine
Um, no. That’s like saying “people in third world countries have unpleasant lives, therefore we should discount the value of donating to the charities helping them accordingly”.
Um, no. That’s like saying “people in third world countries have unpleasant lives, therefore we should discount the value of donating to the charities helping them accordingly”.
...but that’s correct? Saving ten years of pleasant life creates/preserves more utility than saving ten years of unpleasant life, all else being equal.
The point is that it takes less money to increase the utility of someone living in a third-world country by a fixed amount than to increase the utility of some living in a first world country by the same amount.
Yes, that’s exactly what is being said. You calculate the value of both types of lives, divide by the costs, and go for whichever provides the highest resulting payoff.
In other words, you have not naively assigned the same utility to every life saved, and you have calculated things in proportion to your best guess as to their actual expected utility. You shut up and multiply. This is exactly what the sentence you objected to was trying to say.
Perhaps you already grok this principle so well that you were assuming the sentence was meant to say something else? Otherwise I’m confused why you feel the need to make that point.
That’s true, but the discount factor still applies. Helping people in the third world is cheap enough relative to helping people in the first world that it makes up for the reduced utility per year of life saved.
All else isn’t equal, though. It’s not a comparison between pleasant life and unpleasant life, it’s a comparison between a comparatively unpleasant life and oblivion.
Some people might attach negative utility to an unpleasant life, but, like people who mischaracterize how unhappy a debilitating injury will make them, they’re probably overestimating the relationship between their current life and their current level of happiness.
That’s not where the misunderstanding lies, though. If we take the sentence:
“people in third world countries have unpleasant lives, therefore we should discount the value of donating to the charities helping them accordingly”
It is very much true, almost trivially so. The value of the donation gets reduced by a factor proportional to the unpleasantness of the life versus some other, more pleasant life in a high-prosperity region. So if saving either life costs the same, or if the difference in cost does not cover the difference in unpleasantness, then it is better to save the pleasant life with this money.
However, what seems to be the issue here is that “discount” and “accordingly” are being charged with connotation, rather than taken as mathematical factors in an equation. It is true that in the current state of the current world we live in, the E.U. of saving a life in a third-world country is better than saving a life in a first-world one, because it is much cheaper, and because it doesn’t correlate that well with life-pleasantness anyway. This may be where the objections are coming from.
So what’s being said is that you should calculate the expected utility of a post-apocalypse (or third-world) life as lower than that of a modern life. Then, calculate the costs as normal. Then, calculate the probabilities as normal. Then, calculate expected utility in proper fashion, having accounted for the difference in value.
It’s all very much straightforward to me and implied by most utilitarian calculus I’ve seen, so I’m somewhat baffled by the presence of so many objections to that claim.
Suppose the fallout shelter would guarantee your survival. Suppose furthermore that the massive meteor storm or whatever it is guaranteed to save your life from is guaranteed to hit the planet (or whatever) in five years. How do you feel about your discount rate in this scenario, with the other variables stripped away?
Suppose furthermore that fallout shelters are expensive enough that you either spend the five years living a very spartan existence, which will continue after the fact, or living it up with every luxury you’ve ever denied yourself in the five years you’re going to get.
Um, no. That’s like saying “people in third world countries have unpleasant lives, therefore we should discount the value of donating to the charities helping them accordingly”.
...but that’s correct? Saving ten years of pleasant life creates/preserves more utility than saving ten years of unpleasant life, all else being equal.
The point is that it takes less money to increase the utility of someone living in a third-world country by a fixed amount than to increase the utility of some living in a first world country by the same amount.
Yes, that’s exactly what is being said. You calculate the value of both types of lives, divide by the costs, and go for whichever provides the highest resulting payoff.
In other words, you have not naively assigned the same utility to every life saved, and you have calculated things in proportion to your best guess as to their actual expected utility. You shut up and multiply. This is exactly what the sentence you objected to was trying to say.
Perhaps you already grok this principle so well that you were assuming the sentence was meant to say something else? Otherwise I’m confused why you feel the need to make that point.
That’s true, but the discount factor still applies. Helping people in the third world is cheap enough relative to helping people in the first world that it makes up for the reduced utility per year of life saved.
The same discount factor applies to helping yourself in probability branches where you experience disasters, at the expense of ones where you don’t.
All else isn’t equal, though. It’s not a comparison between pleasant life and unpleasant life, it’s a comparison between a comparatively unpleasant life and oblivion.
Some people might attach negative utility to an unpleasant life, but, like people who mischaracterize how unhappy a debilitating injury will make them, they’re probably overestimating the relationship between their current life and their current level of happiness.
That’s not where the misunderstanding lies, though. If we take the sentence:
It is very much true, almost trivially so. The value of the donation gets reduced by a factor proportional to the unpleasantness of the life versus some other, more pleasant life in a high-prosperity region. So if saving either life costs the same, or if the difference in cost does not cover the difference in unpleasantness, then it is better to save the pleasant life with this money.
However, what seems to be the issue here is that “discount” and “accordingly” are being charged with connotation, rather than taken as mathematical factors in an equation. It is true that in the current state of the current world we live in, the E.U. of saving a life in a third-world country is better than saving a life in a first-world one, because it is much cheaper, and because it doesn’t correlate that well with life-pleasantness anyway. This may be where the objections are coming from.
So what’s being said is that you should calculate the expected utility of a post-apocalypse (or third-world) life as lower than that of a modern life. Then, calculate the costs as normal. Then, calculate the probabilities as normal. Then, calculate expected utility in proper fashion, having accounted for the difference in value.
It’s all very much straightforward to me and implied by most utilitarian calculus I’ve seen, so I’m somewhat baffled by the presence of so many objections to that claim.
Suppose the fallout shelter would guarantee your survival. Suppose furthermore that the massive meteor storm or whatever it is guaranteed to save your life from is guaranteed to hit the planet (or whatever) in five years. How do you feel about your discount rate in this scenario, with the other variables stripped away?
Suppose furthermore that fallout shelters are expensive enough that you either spend the five years living a very spartan existence, which will continue after the fact, or living it up with every luxury you’ve ever denied yourself in the five years you’re going to get.