I’m not very confident in my argument, but the particular scenario you describe sounds plausible to me.
Trying to imagine it in a simpler, global health setting—you could ask which of many problems to try to solve (e.g. malaria, snake bites, cancer), some of which may cause several orders of magnitude more suffering than others every year. If the solutions require things that are relatively straightforward—funding, scaling up production of something, etc. - it could be obvious which one to pick. But if the solutions require more difficult things, like research, or like solving decades-old distribution problems in Africa, then maybe the uncertainty can be strong enough to influence your decision noticeably.
I’m not very confident in my argument, but the particular scenario you describe sounds plausible to me.
Trying to imagine it in a simpler, global health setting—you could ask which of many problems to try to solve (e.g. malaria, snake bites, cancer), some of which may cause several orders of magnitude more suffering than others every year. If the solutions require things that are relatively straightforward—funding, scaling up production of something, etc. - it could be obvious which one to pick. But if the solutions require more difficult things, like research, or like solving decades-old distribution problems in Africa, then maybe the uncertainty can be strong enough to influence your decision noticeably.