I’ve gotten the impression that eliciting discount rates is actually quite tricky and noisy. (From e.g. Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review which finds discount rates varying over many orders of magnitude.) How did you all deal with these sorts of issues? For example, what was your thinking on choosing the question framing you did rather than other frames?
First I conducted what might grandiosely be called qualitative research. To be totally transparent about the nature of this “qualitative research”, I approached some strangers in coffee shops or similar venues and asked them a series of questions about their values, in some cases (from memory, n=4) this resulted in an in-depth discussion of the moral value of those in the far future. At the time I thought of this as supporting a different project, although in reality it informed my choice of question wording for the initial study.
Even by the standards of qual research this is a small sample size, but it gave me the impressions that
talking explicitly about discount rates is meaningless (I couldn’t bring myself to even try)
100 years from now feels closer to today than 500 years from now, because you could imagine your grandchildren being alive then, and you care about them (the people I spoke to seemed too young to have grandchildren). But 500 years from now feels like the far future, and doesn’t feel any different than, say, 1,000 years from now or 5,000 years from now.
discussions about values in the abstract were difficult, and subjects asked me for more information because they felt unable to answer questions about the amount of value they place on lives in the far future when the questions were posed in the abstract.
The trade-off questions (would you rather save 1 life today or X lives 500 years from now) were meaningful, and people felt able to answer those questions.
In the follow-up nationally representative study, Rethink formulated a different wording of question, and they may be better able to comment on those.
I’ve gotten the impression that eliciting discount rates is actually quite tricky and noisy. (From e.g. Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review which finds discount rates varying over many orders of magnitude.) How did you all deal with these sorts of issues? For example, what was your thinking on choosing the question framing you did rather than other frames?
First I conducted what might grandiosely be called qualitative research. To be totally transparent about the nature of this “qualitative research”, I approached some strangers in coffee shops or similar venues and asked them a series of questions about their values, in some cases (from memory, n=4) this resulted in an in-depth discussion of the moral value of those in the far future. At the time I thought of this as supporting a different project, although in reality it informed my choice of question wording for the initial study.
Even by the standards of qual research this is a small sample size, but it gave me the impressions that
talking explicitly about discount rates is meaningless (I couldn’t bring myself to even try)
100 years from now feels closer to today than 500 years from now, because you could imagine your grandchildren being alive then, and you care about them (the people I spoke to seemed too young to have grandchildren). But 500 years from now feels like the far future, and doesn’t feel any different than, say, 1,000 years from now or 5,000 years from now.
discussions about values in the abstract were difficult, and subjects asked me for more information because they felt unable to answer questions about the amount of value they place on lives in the far future when the questions were posed in the abstract.
The trade-off questions (would you rather save 1 life today or X lives 500 years from now) were meaningful, and people felt able to answer those questions.
In the follow-up nationally representative study, Rethink formulated a different wording of question, and they may be better able to comment on those.