Yes, but it’s kind of incoherent to talk about the dollar value of something without having a budget and an opportunity cost; it has to be your willingness-to-pay, not some dollar value in the abstract. Like, it’s not the case that the EA funding community would pay $500B even for huge wins like malaria eradication, end to factory farming, robust AI alignment solution, etc, because it’s impossible: we don’t have $500B.
And I haven’t thought about this much but it seems like we also wouldn’t pay, say, $500M for a 1-in-1000 chance for a “$500B win” because unless you’re defining “$500B win” with respect to your actual willingness-to-pay, you might wind up with many opportunities to take these kinds of moonshots and quickly run out of money. The dollar size of the win still has to ultimately account for your budget.
I think the core issue is that the lottery wins you government dollars, which you can’t actually spend freely. Government dollars are simply worth less, to Pablo, than Pablo’s personal dollars. One way to see this is that if Pablo could spend the government dollars on the other moonshot opportunities, then it would be fine that he’s losing his own money.
So we should stipulate that after calculating abstract dollar values, you have to convert them, by some exchange rate, to personal dollars. The exchange rate simply depends on how much better the opportunities are for personal spending, versus spending government money.
The fact that opportunities can get larger than your budget size seems not to be the core issue for the reason that you mention—that at realistic sizes of opportunity, it is possible to instead buy a lottery for a chance at the opportunity instead.
Yes, but it’s kind of incoherent to talk about the dollar value of something without having a budget and an opportunity cost; it has to be your willingness-to-pay, not some dollar value in the abstract. Like, it’s not the case that the EA funding community would pay $500B even for huge wins like malaria eradication, end to factory farming, robust AI alignment solution, etc, because it’s impossible: we don’t have $500B.
And I haven’t thought about this much but it seems like we also wouldn’t pay, say, $500M for a 1-in-1000 chance for a “$500B win” because unless you’re defining “$500B win” with respect to your actual willingness-to-pay, you might wind up with many opportunities to take these kinds of moonshots and quickly run out of money. The dollar size of the win still has to ultimately account for your budget.
I think the core issue is that the lottery wins you government dollars, which you can’t actually spend freely. Government dollars are simply worth less, to Pablo, than Pablo’s personal dollars. One way to see this is that if Pablo could spend the government dollars on the other moonshot opportunities, then it would be fine that he’s losing his own money.
So we should stipulate that after calculating abstract dollar values, you have to convert them, by some exchange rate, to personal dollars. The exchange rate simply depends on how much better the opportunities are for personal spending, versus spending government money.
The fact that opportunities can get larger than your budget size seems not to be the core issue for the reason that you mention—that at realistic sizes of opportunity, it is possible to instead buy a lottery for a chance at the opportunity instead.