They value safety of strangers higher than their own safety, and want to take the vaccine for the sake of all the people at risk in the society.
This is the wrong framing. Taking a vaccine does not exchange 5 personal utility against 5 external utility. The amount of damage prevented is way way higher than the amount of personal damage.
Say that, at the time the vaccine is available, R=0.4 (tell me if you think this is unrealistic). Then, the expected number of people you will infect is ∑∞k=10.4k=0.41−0.4=23. So getting vaccinated will save 23 people from getting Covid, in expectation. However, this is a probability distribution that includes outcomes where several people get it, so even if you somehow don’t interact with old (or otherwise high-risk) people, you certainly cannot control that such people ultimately get it.
Now, if your net utility of avoiding the vaccine is 5, the average utility for these 23 people might be −300 or something, since they might straight up die from it. Which means you’re exchanging a small amount of personal utility for a large amount of negative external utility, in this case −200. It is absolutely possible to value your own safety more than that of other people and still consider it a moral obligation to get vaccinated, as long as you don’t value it a hundred+ times more.
Valid point, thanks. Although I’m not very fond of this kind of calculations of utility, your point is well made.
In my case, I probably wouldn’t give my life for less than lives of a billion strangers, so that ratio would have to be extremely high, to the point where it’s probably incalculable.
I mean, to be clear, making this call doesn’t require you to be incredibly altruistic here, it just requires you to care at all about trading with people around you, and acting at all with something like the principle of generalizability in mind (or TDT, or UDT, or whatever other flavor of game-theory that helps you describe principles that enable positive-sum trades and avoid negative sum equilibria).
In my case, I probably wouldn’t give my life for less than lives of a billion strangers, so that ratio would have to be extremely high, to the point where it’s probably incalculable.
This is the wrong framing. Taking a vaccine does not exchange 5 personal utility against 5 external utility. The amount of damage prevented is way way higher than the amount of personal damage.
Say that, at the time the vaccine is available, R=0.4 (tell me if you think this is unrealistic). Then, the expected number of people you will infect is ∑∞k=10.4k=0.41−0.4=23. So getting vaccinated will save 23 people from getting Covid, in expectation. However, this is a probability distribution that includes outcomes where several people get it, so even if you somehow don’t interact with old (or otherwise high-risk) people, you certainly cannot control that such people ultimately get it.
Now, if your net utility of avoiding the vaccine is 5, the average utility for these 23 people might be −300 or something, since they might straight up die from it. Which means you’re exchanging a small amount of personal utility for a large amount of negative external utility, in this case −200. It is absolutely possible to value your own safety more than that of other people and still consider it a moral obligation to get vaccinated, as long as you don’t value it a hundred+ times more.
Valid point, thanks. Although I’m not very fond of this kind of calculations of utility, your point is well made.
In my case, I probably wouldn’t give my life for less than lives of a billion strangers, so that ratio would have to be extremely high, to the point where it’s probably incalculable.
I mean, to be clear, making this call doesn’t require you to be incredibly altruistic here, it just requires you to care at all about trading with people around you, and acting at all with something like the principle of generalizability in mind (or TDT, or UDT, or whatever other flavor of game-theory that helps you describe principles that enable positive-sum trades and avoid negative sum equilibria).
Okay, in that case, your position is actually consistent and your question valid. I’m pretty sure that’s a minority position on LW, though.
Why?