There's an interesting thought experiment referenced in this article, but I'm not sure it holds. "The philosopher John Searle made precisely this argument abou

There's an interesting thought experiment referenced in this article, but I'm not sure it holds. "The philosopher John Searle made precisely this argument about the standard conception of rationality. His point was that there are no odds that would rationally allow a parent to bet the life of their child for a quarter. Human nature just doesn’t work that way, and it shouldn’t work that way." I agree that it sounds morally repugnant to risk your child's life for a quarter, but in practice people do do this all the time. Imagine your child wants ice cream. There is some utility in taking your child to the nearby ice cream parlor. Your child will be made happy and you will be made happy by making your child happy. However, this is not infinite utility. In other words, there is probably some amount of money I could offer you to not take your child to get ice cream today. If I offered you 10,000 dollars to not get your child ice cream today, I bet the vast majority of people would take the deal. That sets the upper bound of the utility of taking your child to the ice cream parlor at 10,000 dollars. Suppose the ice cream parlor is 3 miles away (I just checked the distance to my favorite ice cream parlor and it is 3 miles away). In the United States this website[1] says there is approximately 1 death per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. We could rephrase that as 1 * 10^-8 chance to die per vehicle mile traveled. This risk may be high, presumably you aren't drunk or impaired, maybe you're a better driver than average or have a safer or better maintained car, or live in a safer place, but the risk of death isn't zero. If you are willing to drive your child 3 miles to go get ice cream then it seems like you are willing to expose your child to the risk of death from car accidents for utility that is less than 10,000 dollars. Putting those ideas together we could calculate the odds where a parent would, in practice, risk the life of their child for a quarter. I don't quite know what to make of this. I tend to think that people would regard doing odds calculations like this for real life decisions as somewhat sociopathic and would just prefer to live as if significantly unlikely bad things were impossible or just refuse to think about the moral implications of probabilities. That seems similar to what the article is saying, people just prefer to live as if bad super collider or AI experiments won't happen rather than reason about them. I tend to think that being too "reasonable" on a local scale is bad. That is, I will still take my children to go get ice cream even though I know driving is a risk. At higher levels though I want people to be making decisions that are increasingly based on reason and probabilities. I do want the traffic engineers to be reasoning about vehicle deaths per mile and the like when they are setting speed limits, traffic signs, and the like. For things like AI and, I suppose, super colliders, our decision makers should absolutely be considering things rationally. 1 - https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...