it’s very possible that it could become a practical problem at some point in the future.
I kind of doubt it. Practical problems will have complexity and details that overwhelm this simple model, making it near-irrelevant. Alternately, it may be worth trying to frame a practical decision that an individual or small group (so as not to have to abstract away crowd and public choice issues) could make where this is important.
Do you think a logarithmic scale makes more sense than a linear scale?
Yes, but it probably doesn’t fix the underlying problem that quantifications are unstable and highly variable across agents.
For clarity – I do agree that a simple stacking model like this has its flaws as each individual ‘unit’ of discomfort / pain will not never be exactly equal in practice.
If you have the time, I’d like you to read my response to CstineSublime’s comment.
Regardless of whether or not some version of this thought experiment ever becomes a serious practical problem, if there was some non-zero chance of having a situation where a decision like this had to be made, wouldn’t it make sense to have some method of comparison?
In reality, every ‘stacking theory’ requires a bunch of assumptions, but if the decision had to be made for some reason, do you think a logarithmic scale is a more appropriate one to use?
I think that insisting on comparing unmeasurable and different things is an error. If forced to do so, you can make up whatever numbers you like, and nobody can prove you wrong. If you make up numbers that don’t fully contradict common intuitions based on much-smaller-range and much-more-complicated choices, you can probably convince yourself of almost anything.
Note that on smaller, more complicated, specific decisions, there are many that seem to be inconsistent with this comparison: some people accept painful or risky surgery over chronic annoyances, some don’t. There are extremely common examples of failing to mitigate pretty serious harm for distant strangers, in favor of mild comfort for oneself and closer friends/family (as well as some examples of the reverse). There are orders of magnitude in variance, enough to overwhelm whatever calculation you think is universal.
I kind of doubt it. Practical problems will have complexity and details that overwhelm this simple model, making it near-irrelevant. Alternately, it may be worth trying to frame a practical decision that an individual or small group (so as not to have to abstract away crowd and public choice issues) could make where this is important.
Yes, but it probably doesn’t fix the underlying problem that quantifications are unstable and highly variable across agents.
For clarity – I do agree that a simple stacking model like this has its flaws as each individual ‘unit’ of discomfort / pain will not never be exactly equal in practice.
If you have the time, I’d like you to read my response to CstineSublime’s comment.
Regardless of whether or not some version of this thought experiment ever becomes a serious practical problem, if there was some non-zero chance of having a situation where a decision like this had to be made, wouldn’t it make sense to have some method of comparison?
In reality, every ‘stacking theory’ requires a bunch of assumptions, but if the decision had to be made for some reason, do you think a logarithmic scale is a more appropriate one to use?
I think that insisting on comparing unmeasurable and different things is an error. If forced to do so, you can make up whatever numbers you like, and nobody can prove you wrong. If you make up numbers that don’t fully contradict common intuitions based on much-smaller-range and much-more-complicated choices, you can probably convince yourself of almost anything.
Note that on smaller, more complicated, specific decisions, there are many that seem to be inconsistent with this comparison: some people accept painful or risky surgery over chronic annoyances, some don’t. There are extremely common examples of failing to mitigate pretty serious harm for distant strangers, in favor of mild comfort for oneself and closer friends/family (as well as some examples of the reverse). There are orders of magnitude in variance, enough to overwhelm whatever calculation you think is universal.