A big difference in button 1 (small benefit for someone) and 1A (small chance of a small benefit for a large number of people) is the kind of system required for these outcomes.
Button 1 requires basically a days worth of investment by someone making a choice to give it to another. Button 1A requires… perhaps a million times as much effort? We’re talking about the equivalent of passing a national holiday act. This ends up requiring an enormous amount of coordination and investment. And the results do not scale linearly at all. That is, a person investing a day’s worth of effort to try and pass a national holiday act don’t have a 10E-8 chance of working. They have a much much smaller chance. Many many orders of magnitude less.
In other words, the worlds posited by a realistic interpretation of what these buttons mean are completely different, and the world where button 1A process succeeds is to be preferred by at least six orders of magnitude. In other words, the colloquial understanding of the “big” impact is closer to right than the multiplication suggests.
I’m not sure exactly how that impacts the overall conclusions, but I think this same dynamic applies to several odd conclusions—the flaw is that the button is doing much much much more work in some situations than in others described as identical, and that descriptive flaw is pumping our intuitions to ignore those differences rather than address them.
A big difference in button 1 (small benefit for someone) and 1A (small chance of a small benefit for a large number of people) is the kind of system required for these outcomes.
Button 1 requires basically a days worth of investment by someone making a choice to give it to another. Button 1A requires… perhaps a million times as much effort? We’re talking about the equivalent of passing a national holiday act. This ends up requiring an enormous amount of coordination and investment. And the results do not scale linearly at all. That is, a person investing a day’s worth of effort to try and pass a national holiday act don’t have a 10E-8 chance of working. They have a much much smaller chance. Many many orders of magnitude less.
In other words, the worlds posited by a realistic interpretation of what these buttons mean are completely different, and the world where button 1A process succeeds is to be preferred by at least six orders of magnitude. In other words, the colloquial understanding of the “big” impact is closer to right than the multiplication suggests.
I’m not sure exactly how that impacts the overall conclusions, but I think this same dynamic applies to several odd conclusions—the flaw is that the button is doing much much much more work in some situations than in others described as identical, and that descriptive flaw is pumping our intuitions to ignore those differences rather than address them.