“I would be much less sanguine about error theories regarding such utterances if we didn’t also see people in surveys saying they would rather take $1000 than a 15% chance of $1M, or $100 now rather than $140 a year later, i.e. utterances that are clearly mistakes.”
These could be reasonable due to asymmetric information and a potentially adversarial situation, so respondents don’t really trust that the chance of $1M is that high, or that they’ll actually get the $140 a year from now. I would actually expect most people to pick the $100 now over $140 in a year with real money, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if many would pick $1000 over a 15% chance of a million with real money. People are often ambiguity-averse. Of course, they may not really accept the premises of the hypotheticals.
You do see a bunch of crazy financial behavior in the world, but it decreases as people get more experience individually and especially socially (and with better cognitive understanding).
People do engage in rounding to zero in a lot of cases, but with lots of experience will also take on pain and injury with high cumulative or instantaneous probability (e.g. electric shocks to get rewards, labor pains, war, jobs that involve daily frequencies of choking fumes or injury.
Re lexical views that still make probabilistic tradeoffs, I don’t really see the appeal of contorting lexical views that will still be crazy with respect to real world cases so that one can say they assign infinitesimal value to good things in impossible hypotheticals (but effectively 0 in real life). Real world cases like labor pain and risking severe injury doing stuff aren’t about infinitesimal value too small for us to even perceive, but macroscopic value that we are motivated by. Is there a parameterization you would suggest as plausible and addressing that?
Yes, but they might not really be able to entertain the assumptions of the hypotheticals because they’re too abstract and removed from the real world cases they would plausibly face.
with lots of experience will also take on pain and injury with high cumulative or instantaneous probability (e.g. electric shocks to get rewards, labor pains, war, jobs that involve daily frequencies of choking fumes or injury.
(...)
Real world cases like labor pain and risking severe injury doing stuff aren’t about infinitesimal value too small for us to even perceive, but macroscopic value that we are motivated by. Is there a parameterization you would suggest as plausible and addressing that?
Very plausibly none of these possibilities would meet the lexical threshold, except with very very low probability. These people almost never beg to be killed, so the probability of unbearable suffering seems very low for any individual. The lexical threshold could be set based on bearableness or consent or something similar (e.g. Tomasik, Vinding). Coming up with a particular parameterization seems like a bit of work, though, and I’d need more time to think about that, but it’s worth noting that the same practical problem applies to very large aggregates of finite goods/bads, e.g. Heaven or Hell, very long lives, or huge numbers of mind uploads.
There’s also a question of whether a life of unrelenting but less intense suffering can be lexically negative even if no particular experience meets some intensity threshold that would be lexically negative in all lives. Some might think of Omelas this way, and Mogensen’s “The weight of suffering” is inclusive of this view (and also allows experiential lexical thresholds), although I don’t think he discusses any particular parameterization.
Very plausibly none of these possibilities would meet the lexical threshold, except with very very low probability.
I’m confused. :) War has a rather high probability of extreme suffering. Perhaps ~10% of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been killed as of July 2022. Some fraction of fighters in tanks die by burning to death:
The kinetic energy and friction from modern rounds causes molten metal to splash everywhere in the crew compartment and ignites the air into a fireball. You would die by melting.
You’ll hear of a tank cooking off as it’s ammunition explodes. That doesn’t happen right away. There’s lots to burn inside a tank other that the tank rounds. Often, the tank will burn for quite awhile before the tank rounds explode.
It is sometimes a slow horrific death if one can’t get out in time or a very quick one. We had side arms and all agreed that if our tank was burning and we were caught inside and couldn’t get out. We would use a round on ourselves. That’s how bad it was.
Some workplace accidents also produce extremely painful injuries.
I don’t know what fraction of people in labor wish they were dead, but probably it’s not negligible: “I remember repeatedly saying I wanted to die.”
These people almost never beg to be killed
It may not make sense to beg to be killed, because the doctors wouldn’t grant that wish.
I don’t expect most war deaths to be nearly as painful as burning to death, but I was too quick to dismiss the frequency of very very bad deaths. I had capture and torture in mind as whatever passes the lexical threshold, and so very rare.
Also fair about labor. I don’t think it really gives us an estimate of the frequency of unbearable suffering, although it seems like trauma is common and women aren’t getting as much pain relief as they’d like in the UK.
“I would be much less sanguine about error theories regarding such utterances if we didn’t also see people in surveys saying they would rather take $1000 than a 15% chance of $1M, or $100 now rather than $140 a year later, i.e. utterances that are clearly mistakes.”
These could be reasonable due to asymmetric information and a potentially adversarial situation, so respondents don’t really trust that the chance of $1M is that high, or that they’ll actually get the $140 a year from now. I would actually expect most people to pick the $100 now over $140 in a year with real money, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if many would pick $1000 over a 15% chance of a million with real money. People are often ambiguity-averse. Of course, they may not really accept the premises of the hypotheticals.
With respect to antiaggregationist views, people could just be ignoring small enough probabilities regardless of the severity of the risk. There are also utility functions where any definite amount of A outweighs any definite amount of B, but probabilistic tradeoffs between them are still possible: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GK7Qq4kww5D8ndckR/michaelstjules-s-shortform?commentId=4Bvbtkq83CPWZPNLB
In the surveys they know it’s all hypothetical.
You do see a bunch of crazy financial behavior in the world, but it decreases as people get more experience individually and especially socially (and with better cognitive understanding).
People do engage in rounding to zero in a lot of cases, but with lots of experience will also take on pain and injury with high cumulative or instantaneous probability (e.g. electric shocks to get rewards, labor pains, war, jobs that involve daily frequencies of choking fumes or injury.
Re lexical views that still make probabilistic tradeoffs, I don’t really see the appeal of contorting lexical views that will still be crazy with respect to real world cases so that one can say they assign infinitesimal value to good things in impossible hypotheticals (but effectively 0 in real life). Real world cases like labor pain and risking severe injury doing stuff aren’t about infinitesimal value too small for us to even perceive, but macroscopic value that we are motivated by. Is there a parameterization you would suggest as plausible and addressing that?
Yes, but they might not really be able to entertain the assumptions of the hypotheticals because they’re too abstract and removed from the real world cases they would plausibly face.
Very plausibly none of these possibilities would meet the lexical threshold, except with very very low probability. These people almost never beg to be killed, so the probability of unbearable suffering seems very low for any individual. The lexical threshold could be set based on bearableness or consent or something similar (e.g. Tomasik, Vinding). Coming up with a particular parameterization seems like a bit of work, though, and I’d need more time to think about that, but it’s worth noting that the same practical problem applies to very large aggregates of finite goods/bads, e.g. Heaven or Hell, very long lives, or huge numbers of mind uploads.
There’s also a question of whether a life of unrelenting but less intense suffering can be lexically negative even if no particular experience meets some intensity threshold that would be lexically negative in all lives. Some might think of Omelas this way, and Mogensen’s “The weight of suffering” is inclusive of this view (and also allows experiential lexical thresholds), although I don’t think he discusses any particular parameterization.
I’m confused. :) War has a rather high probability of extreme suffering. Perhaps ~10% of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been killed as of July 2022. Some fraction of fighters in tanks die by burning to death:
Some workplace accidents also produce extremely painful injuries.
I don’t know what fraction of people in labor wish they were dead, but probably it’s not negligible: “I remember repeatedly saying I wanted to die.”
It may not make sense to beg to be killed, because the doctors wouldn’t grant that wish.
Good points.
I don’t expect most war deaths to be nearly as painful as burning to death, but I was too quick to dismiss the frequency of very very bad deaths. I had capture and torture in mind as whatever passes the lexical threshold, and so very rare.
Also fair about labor. I don’t think it really gives us an estimate of the frequency of unbearable suffering, although it seems like trauma is common and women aren’t getting as much pain relief as they’d like in the UK.
On workplace injuries, in the US in 2020, the highest rate by occupation seems to be around 200 nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 100,000 workers, and 20 deaths per 100,000 workers, but they could be even higher in more specific roles: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/most-dangerous-industries/
I assume these are estimates of the number of injuries in 2020 only, too, so the lifetime risk is several times higher in such occupations. Maybe the death rate is similar to the rate of unbearable pain, around 1 out of 5,000 per year, which seems non-tiny when added up over a lifetime (around 0.4% over 20 years assuming a geometric distribution https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-(1-1%2F5000)^20), but also similar in probability to the kinds of risks we do mitigate without eliminating (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5y3vzEAXhGskBhtAD/most-small-probabilities-aren-t-pascalian?commentId=jY9o6XviumXfaxNQw).