In response to the statement, “If you tell people a reactor design produces less waste, they rate its probability of meltdown as lower”, this may be the result of a useful heuristic if technologies generally improve overall. Consider computers: if I asked people to guess if the amount of memory in a desktop computer with a 300MHz processor is less than or greater than that in a system with a 2GHz processor, they might reason that the computer with the faster processor is newer, that both technologies have improved, and the 2GHz system most likely has more memory as well. Similarly in the example, people may think that both anti-meltdown and anti-waste technologies are likely to have improved concurrently. This isn’t to say that both factors don’t need to be looked at separately in the “real world”—only that I’m not sure how we could consider any other answer rational in the absence of further information.
Basically, I’m curious if benefits and costs are really positively correlated to one another in the real world, as shown in Exhibit 1 in the PDF.
In response to the statement, “If you tell people a reactor design produces less waste, they rate its probability of meltdown as lower”, this may be the result of a useful heuristic if technologies generally improve overall. Consider computers: if I asked people to guess if the amount of memory in a desktop computer with a 300MHz processor is less than or greater than that in a system with a 2GHz processor, they might reason that the computer with the faster processor is newer, that both technologies have improved, and the 2GHz system most likely has more memory as well. Similarly in the example, people may think that both anti-meltdown and anti-waste technologies are likely to have improved concurrently. This isn’t to say that both factors don’t need to be looked at separately in the “real world”—only that I’m not sure how we could consider any other answer rational in the absence of further information.
Basically, I’m curious if benefits and costs are really positively correlated to one another in the real world, as shown in Exhibit 1 in the PDF.