...the charity I had in mind is not super well funded...
I can see a problem with the way that I phrased the question here. I wanted an example of something that a person would value and want to make happen, but which they might plausibly not find out about. I wasn’t imagining a specific charity, but I was thinking of something linear in terms of good done per money donated, which would be something large that’s already adequately funded but not saturated. Yet one could imagine a specific charity when answering the question, and the conditions of that charity could affect the shape of the utility-vs-money curve. That means that the question could end up measuring a feature of someone’s contextual utility-vs-money curve instead of measuring their reaction to risk.
I just need an example of something that’s really good, and something else that’s five times as good, both which a person might not find out about. Maybe we could use lives saved—strangers’ lives, and you’ll never find out who—but people could have weird moral intuitions regarding saving lives that distort the results. (There’s a famous example of a framing effect, the ‘Asian disease’ problem, based on this.)
We could stick with the charity example and specify linearity in utility-vs-money, but that wouldn’t be a concise question, and it could be misunderstood.
Scenario B: 89% odds your friend gets $10, 10% odds they get dollars50 (lesswrong fucks the formatting if I use another dollar sign on this line for some reason. I’m on mobile and don’t see an option to change any formatting settings), 1% odds they get nothing
Scenario C: 11% odds your friend gets $10, 89% odds they get nothing
Scenario D: 10% odds your friend gets $50, 90% odds they get nothing
I pick B and D in these, because if my friend gets nothing in any of those scenarios it doesn’t matter. I think it really is an issue where once the guaranteed value in A gets past a certain point, almost any odds of losing it become intolerable. Maybe human values aren’t linear?
edit: and if it’s a well-funded-but-not-saturated charity, I pick B and D too, although if we’re talking about a million and 5 million it’s a tough call.
A potential reframe: certainty has a lot of value. I would not pay $10 for a plane ticket with 10% odds that I actually get to go to the place, because I can’t plan around that effectively, even if the expected value is the same as a ticket that costs dollars100 and takes me with ~100% certainty
I can see a problem with the way that I phrased the question here. I wanted an example of something that a person would value and want to make happen, but which they might plausibly not find out about. I wasn’t imagining a specific charity, but I was thinking of something linear in terms of good done per money donated, which would be something large that’s already adequately funded but not saturated. Yet one could imagine a specific charity when answering the question, and the conditions of that charity could affect the shape of the utility-vs-money curve. That means that the question could end up measuring a feature of someone’s contextual utility-vs-money curve instead of measuring their reaction to risk.
I just need an example of something that’s really good, and something else that’s five times as good, both which a person might not find out about. Maybe we could use lives saved—strangers’ lives, and you’ll never find out who—but people could have weird moral intuitions regarding saving lives that distort the results. (There’s a famous example of a framing effect, the ‘Asian disease’ problem, based on this.)
We could stick with the charity example and specify linearity in utility-vs-money, but that wouldn’t be a concise question, and it could be misunderstood.
Does anyone have any better ideas?
Scenario A: your friend gets $10
Scenario B: 89% odds your friend gets $10, 10% odds they get dollars50 (lesswrong fucks the formatting if I use another dollar sign on this line for some reason. I’m on mobile and don’t see an option to change any formatting settings), 1% odds they get nothing
Scenario C: 11% odds your friend gets $10, 89% odds they get nothing
Scenario D: 10% odds your friend gets $50, 90% odds they get nothing
I pick B and D in these, because if my friend gets nothing in any of those scenarios it doesn’t matter. I think it really is an issue where once the guaranteed value in A gets past a certain point, almost any odds of losing it become intolerable. Maybe human values aren’t linear?
edit: and if it’s a well-funded-but-not-saturated charity, I pick B and D too, although if we’re talking about a million and 5 million it’s a tough call.
A potential reframe: certainty has a lot of value. I would not pay $10 for a plane ticket with 10% odds that I actually get to go to the place, because I can’t plan around that effectively, even if the expected value is the same as a ticket that costs dollars100 and takes me with ~100% certainty