The human brain can’t emotionally represent large quantities; an environmental measure that will save 200,000 birds doesn’t conjure anywhere near a hundred times the emotional impact and willingness-to-pay of a measure that would save 2,000 birds, even though in fact the former measure is two orders of magnitude more effective.
There are probably more posts to tag, I haven’t been super thorough.
From the old talk page:
Talk:Scope insensitivity
This [video http://www.fallen.io/ww2/] is a great visual display of quantitative information. It describes the deaths in World War II. Eliezer [posted https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153385579719228] it on Facebook.
The point where they showed the amount of Soviet deaths was one of the moments where I felt the least scope insensitive as I’ve ever felt. I sense that watching the video would really help people a) internalize what scope insensitivity is, and b) be less insensitive to scope. And so I think it deserves to be on the wiki page.