After shutting up and multiplying, Daniel realizes (with growing horror) that the amount he acutally cares about oiled birds is lower bounded by two months of hard work and/or fifty thousand dollars.
Fifty thousand times the marginal utility of a dollar, which is probably much less than the utility difference between the status quo and having fifty thousand dollars less unless Daniel is filthy rich.
Yeah it’s actually a huge pain in the ass to try to value things given that people tend to be short on both time and money. (For example, an EA probably rates a dollar going towards de-oiling a bird as negative value due to the opportunity cost, even if they feel that de-oiling a bird has positive value in some “intrinsic” sense.)
I didn’t really want to go into my thoughts on how you should try to evaluate “intrinsic” worth (or what that even means) in this post, both for reasons of time and complexity, but if you’re looking for an easier way to do the evaluation yourself, consider queries such as “would I prefer that my society produce, on the margin, another bic lighter or another bird deoiling?”. This analysis is biased in the opposite direction from “how much of my own money would I like to pay”, and is definitely not a good metric alone, but it might point you in the right direction when it comes to finding various metrics and comparisons by which to probe your intrinsic sense of bird-worth.
Fifty thousand times the marginal utility of a dollar, which is probably much less than the utility difference between the status quo and having fifty thousand dollars less unless Daniel is filthy rich.
Yeah it’s actually a huge pain in the ass to try to value things given that people tend to be short on both time and money. (For example, an EA probably rates a dollar going towards de-oiling a bird as negative value due to the opportunity cost, even if they feel that de-oiling a bird has positive value in some “intrinsic” sense.)
I didn’t really want to go into my thoughts on how you should try to evaluate “intrinsic” worth (or what that even means) in this post, both for reasons of time and complexity, but if you’re looking for an easier way to do the evaluation yourself, consider queries such as “would I prefer that my society produce, on the margin, another bic lighter or another bird deoiling?”. This analysis is biased in the opposite direction from “how much of my own money would I like to pay”, and is definitely not a good metric alone, but it might point you in the right direction when it comes to finding various metrics and comparisons by which to probe your intrinsic sense of bird-worth.