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Philosophy is not my favorite subject. Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the

Philosophy is not my favorite subject. Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the chance to trade the existence of an entire species in order to end world hunger, I would have to decline. I might forever regret the decision, but I have no natural right to make that decision. (Unless we're talking about mosquitoes. I would happily contribute to their extinction.) If philosophy isn't the proper arena for this crowd, then perhaps game theory is more applicable: if I decline that offer, then we're no worse off than before; however, if I accept, we may be better off -- if the gambit works -- unless there are consequences, in which case we may end up worse off. This is a classic high-risk/high-payoff situation, and I do not gamble. A loaf of bread is $4 not because it has anything to do with what I'm "willing" to pay for, but because someone has calculated that they can produce that product and sell it for that price and continue doing business. You might counter-argue that they only charge that because enough people are willing to pay for it, but the reality is macroeconomics is much different -- as is the reality of supermarket pricing. It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people. I mean, to bring this point home, how about if someone asks me if I'm willing to trade the lives of your family for the sake of feeding the homeless in my county? Based on your argument so far, that should be an easy choice for me to make ...

houseabsolute 16y ago
> you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose? It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option. Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  > Now you're just being difficult. I am refusing to be backed into the corner you're painting with your hypotheticals, yes. I think we'll have to simply disagree here. I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise. If deepwater oil drilling cannot be done without a near 100% guarantee against disasters like this one, then I simply think it shouldn't be done. I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    > without a near 100% guarantee Well, what percent guarantee would you need? Is 99.9% per year per well good enough? 99.999%? Seven nines? And how do you propose to measure that risk? These types of situations are after all inherently unforeseen. Anyway, by admitting that a near 100% guarantee is good enough for you (no matter what that "near" is), you've admitted that you're willing to put a price on it. That price is, naturally, the dollar amount that would be required to reach the level of guarantee you want. So yes, the rest of this conversation has just been you being difficult.
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      No, and your accusation that I'm "just being difficult" is starting to piss me off. I think you're a short-sighted, self-centered, argumentative, nihilistic, and stubborn little annoyance -- but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so. Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed. Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything. Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster. Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.
jerf 16y ago
"Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make." Ah, but here's the kicker: When it comes to valuing things, you can't help but choose. If you refuse to choose between the life of your $FAVORITE_PERSON and the destruction of the Sistene Chapel, then you have chosen whatever consequences arise when you refuse to choose. The important thing is not the specifics at stake, which are quite silly here, but the fact that you have to choose. You can't not. You don't get to not choose because it's "arrogant" to choose. You don't get to not choose because "it's hard". You have to choose. Choosing to "not choose" is a choice and in whatever situation your are in constitutes some choice itself. People in the real world have literally and truly faced the choice of which of their children they will save. They chose something. I imagine a non-trivial number of them were paralyzed by the logic you are applying and chose poorly as a result. It may help if you realize that a dollar isn't just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one's family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They're not just scores in a game. They're human life. (In other news, I consider white collar crime grotesquely under punished. Bernie Madoff may not have killed a man, but the damage he did in the aggregate adds up to at least one murder, in my book. He did not steal dollars, he stole life.)
- sprout 16y ago
  I agree with you in general, but I'm not so sure when we look at something like Madoff where money literally vanishes. That money, as you say, represents an actual value that did not actually vanish. It's rather hard to say where it went, but it's unclear that there's a net drop in value for humanity. This could in a certain sense be a case where the broken window fallacy actually holds up to scrutiny. Since the money is merely symbolic, no value is actually lost, merely shifted. People are adversely affected, but if they are spurred to create more value, it's plausible that the net benefit is positive to society.
shadowsun7 16y ago
To be fair thaumaturgy, even economists regularly append values onto 'priceless' things. For instance (this excerpt taken from Freakonomics): > "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl." This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part. The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted. The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work. And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.
- gjm11 16y ago
  > $9 million an owl Quoting the figure that way is really strange. The relevant thing isn't the cost per owl alive now but either the cost per owl potentially alive now and in the future (probably with some discount rate) or the cost for the species considered as a whole. Imagine three alternative worlds. One is ours. One has 10x as many spotted owls currently alive. One has 1/10 as many. In all of them, the owls will (all) go extinct unless we spend $46bn. Does it really make sense to say that in one case the cost is $900k/owl, in another it's $9M/owl, and in another it's $90M/owl? Is there any plausible belief about the value of these owls that would say we should be willing to pay 100x more to prevent extinction in the case where there are 50k of them rather than 500? (It would probably make sense to pay some more when the population is larger. Larger population now means (a) probably larger populations in the future if extinction is averted and (b) better prospects that avoiding extinction now really will avoid extinction for longer. But I don't see any reason to think that either of these is simply proportional to the present population, or anything like it.)
Groxx 16y ago
> It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people. Air for electricity. Risk (ie, life) for progress. The choices have been made before, and will be made in the future. Refusing to admit that such choices exist is your choice... but then how do you explain reality? Doublethink?

houseabsolute 16y ago

> you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose? It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option. Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
> Now you're just being difficult. I am refusing to be backed into the corner you're painting with your hypotheticals, yes. I think we'll have to simply disagree here. I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise. If deepwater oil drilling cannot be done without a near 100% guarantee against disasters like this one, then I simply think it shouldn't be done. I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  > without a near 100% guarantee Well, what percent guarantee would you need? Is 99.9% per year per well good enough? 99.999%? Seven nines? And how do you propose to measure that risk? These types of situations are after all inherently unforeseen. Anyway, by admitting that a near 100% guarantee is good enough for you (no matter what that "near" is), you've admitted that you're willing to put a price on it. That price is, naturally, the dollar amount that would be required to reach the level of guarantee you want. So yes, the rest of this conversation has just been you being difficult.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    No, and your accusation that I'm "just being difficult" is starting to piss me off. I think you're a short-sighted, self-centered, argumentative, nihilistic, and stubborn little annoyance -- but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so. Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed. Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything. Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster. Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.

jerf 16y ago

"Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make." Ah, but here's the kicker: When it comes to valuing things, you can't help but choose. If you refuse to choose between the life of your $FAVORITE_PERSON and the destruction of the Sistene Chapel, then you have chosen whatever consequences arise when you refuse to choose. The important thing is not the specifics at stake, which are quite silly here, but the fact that you have to choose. You can't not. You don't get to not choose because it's "arrogant" to choose. You don't get to not choose because "it's hard". You have to choose. Choosing to "not choose" is a choice and in whatever situation your are in constitutes some choice itself. People in the real world have literally and truly faced the choice of which of their children they will save. They chose something. I imagine a non-trivial number of them were paralyzed by the logic you are applying and chose poorly as a result. It may help if you realize that a dollar isn't just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one's family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They're not just scores in a game. They're human life. (In other news, I consider white collar crime grotesquely under punished. Bernie Madoff may not have killed a man, but the damage he did in the aggregate adds up to at least one murder, in my book. He did not steal dollars, he stole life.)

sprout 16y ago
I agree with you in general, but I'm not so sure when we look at something like Madoff where money literally vanishes. That money, as you say, represents an actual value that did not actually vanish. It's rather hard to say where it went, but it's unclear that there's a net drop in value for humanity. This could in a certain sense be a case where the broken window fallacy actually holds up to scrutiny. Since the money is merely symbolic, no value is actually lost, merely shifted. People are adversely affected, but if they are spurred to create more value, it's plausible that the net benefit is positive to society.

shadowsun7 16y ago

To be fair thaumaturgy, even economists regularly append values onto 'priceless' things. For instance (this excerpt taken from Freakonomics): > "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl." This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part. The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted. The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work. And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.

gjm11 16y ago
> $9 million an owl Quoting the figure that way is really strange. The relevant thing isn't the cost per owl alive now but either the cost per owl potentially alive now and in the future (probably with some discount rate) or the cost for the species considered as a whole. Imagine three alternative worlds. One is ours. One has 10x as many spotted owls currently alive. One has 1/10 as many. In all of them, the owls will (all) go extinct unless we spend $46bn. Does it really make sense to say that in one case the cost is $900k/owl, in another it's $9M/owl, and in another it's $90M/owl? Is there any plausible belief about the value of these owls that would say we should be willing to pay 100x more to prevent extinction in the case where there are 50k of them rather than 500? (It would probably make sense to pay some more when the population is larger. Larger population now means (a) probably larger populations in the future if extinction is averted and (b) better prospects that avoiding extinction now really will avoid extinction for longer. But I don't see any reason to think that either of these is simply proportional to the present population, or anything like it.)

Groxx 16y ago

> It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people. Air for electricity. Risk (ie, life) for progress. The choices have been made before, and will be made in the future. Refusing to admit that such choices exist is your choice... but then how do you explain reality? Doublethink?