From: Jeff L Jones (jeff@spoonless.net)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2008 - 16:25:48 MDT
On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com> wrote:
> A more realistic example would be: suppose your life expectancy is 10,000
> days. How much would you have to be paid to push a button that will kill you
> with probability 1/10000?
I see that as a somewhat different question. For me, the main cost of
pressing the button and getting killed is the negative effects it
would have on my friends and family. A secondary cost would be that I
wouldn't be able to accompilsh all of the things I'd hoped to. So the
price I'd pay doesn't scale linearly with the number of days I expect
to live. In other words, it doesn't seem nearly twice as bad to me to
press such a button if my previous life expectency was 10,000 days
versus 20,000 days.
Jeff
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT