I’m not seeing where there is a tradeoff. Let’s assume you are making a 1hr grocery run in SF. From there, you are faced with a choice: mask or no mask. My argument is that life should be valued wildly highly, and thus wearing a mask is worth it. It’s not like wearing a mask is something that takes money or time, and that you could spend that money or time doing something more valuable (essentially).
I was relying on your numbers that 1 microcovid = $0.01 at $10M per life, and that you believe lives should currently be valued at $10B. Have you changed your mind in either of these areas?
Going by your link, wearing a mask during that trip would be about 0.5 microcovid if you’re vaccinated. Where I live, a disposable mask is about $0.25. I would also not accept $10 to wear a mask when I’m alone for an hour per day for a year, so my discomfort is at least $0.03 per hour. I also care about my appearance, status and about the ease of communication of people seeing my lips move, which even for a grocery trip amounts to several cents per hour cost for wearing a mask.
So, for me, wearing a mask while going grocery shopping in SF for an hour would cost upwards of $0.30. If you already have a rotating set of non-disposable masks so the material costs are negligible on the margin, I would still rate the discomfort and social effects at upwards of $0.05, which means you would have to value your life at at least $100M, or $600M when including disposable or one-time investment material costs. Again, there are lots of trades that should be more valuable than this, including ordering your groceries to be delivered to avoid traffic accidents.
We see this in the US with covid: The same people who didn’t realize that we all should be wearing masks, when they were life-saving, are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.
At $10M/life, I can* agree that a mask isn’t worth it. But if we eg. 1000x the value of life, wearing a mask provides something like $5 of value instead of $0.005, and at that price it would be worth it. So the question becomes whether we should value life wildly highly like this.
The point I was trying to make in my comment was, “perhaps we should value life wildly highly like this”. The following is mentioned in the OP as a way to do “precognition”: “2. Listen to other independent thinkers.” As I explain in this post, I get the impression that if you go by the judgements of these expert, independent thinkers, it might be justifiable to value life wildly highly.
*Not wearing a mask feels like defecting in a prisoners dilemma to me, which makes me feel icky.
I’m not seeing where there is a tradeoff. Let’s assume you are making a 1hr grocery run in SF. From there, you are faced with a choice: mask or no mask. My argument is that life should be valued wildly highly, and thus wearing a mask is worth it. It’s not like wearing a mask is something that takes money or time, and that you could spend that money or time doing something more valuable (essentially).
I was relying on your numbers that 1 microcovid = $0.01 at $10M per life, and that you believe lives should currently be valued at $10B. Have you changed your mind in either of these areas?
Going by your link, wearing a mask during that trip would be about 0.5 microcovid if you’re vaccinated. Where I live, a disposable mask is about $0.25. I would also not accept $10 to wear a mask when I’m alone for an hour per day for a year, so my discomfort is at least $0.03 per hour. I also care about my appearance, status and about the ease of communication of people seeing my lips move, which even for a grocery trip amounts to several cents per hour cost for wearing a mask.
So, for me, wearing a mask while going grocery shopping in SF for an hour would cost upwards of $0.30. If you already have a rotating set of non-disposable masks so the material costs are negligible on the margin, I would still rate the discomfort and social effects at upwards of $0.05, which means you would have to value your life at at least $100M, or $600M when including disposable or one-time investment material costs. Again, there are lots of trades that should be more valuable than this, including ordering your groceries to be delivered to avoid traffic accidents.
In the OP, jasoncrawford says:
At $10M/life, I can* agree that a mask isn’t worth it. But if we eg. 1000x the value of life, wearing a mask provides something like $5 of value instead of $0.005, and at that price it would be worth it. So the question becomes whether we should value life wildly highly like this.
The point I was trying to make in my comment was, “perhaps we should value life wildly highly like this”. The following is mentioned in the OP as a way to do “precognition”: “2. Listen to other independent thinkers.” As I explain in this post, I get the impression that if you go by the judgements of these expert, independent thinkers, it might be justifiable to value life wildly highly.
*Not wearing a mask feels like defecting in a prisoners dilemma to me, which makes me feel icky.