Read on Twitter
The debate on voluntary infection-and-quarantine coming up again. Estimates of COVID CFR for 20—40 y.o.s is around 0.1%. (Selecting on those without underlying conditions would likely make this significantly lower.) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext#seccestitle200
If someone valued their life at $10M, this would suggest a compensation in the range of about $10k for additional risk—i.e., "we'll pay you $10k to sit at home and recover". We see similar bargains made by construction workers for hazard pay. So what's the problem? Answers...
(1) Current fatality rates for construction are about 1 in 10,000; i.e., about x10 lower than the risk from voluntary infection. So we have a non-comparability problem—what matters is the risk, not the expected payoff (would you play Russian roulette for $1M?)
(2) This opening quote from John Searle's "Rationality in Action" is perhaps the best answer to the extension of decision-theoretic reasoning. (Second panel well worth reading as well—on its use not as a normative principle, but as a matter of practice.)
(3) @nntaleb writes below—yes! There are conclusions that one can draw from reasoning that are sub specie aeternitatis—that make sense only if conducted by an ageless, infinite being. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1248297579265134595?s=20
(4) Ordinary life doesn't work well when one reasons SSA. We have other concepts (the "lindy" ones) we put into play. But we have our reasoning, and we go about it anyway! An important chunk of reasoning well is knowing the contexts under which it makes sense to deploy it.
(5) Searle's book is wonderful on this problem. He's engaged with the very compelling thought that one can (ought) to arrange life according to utility theory. And concerned to create an account of reasoning that can answer to its paradoxes.
(6) An enormous chunk of contemporary economic life is coercive (indeed, tantamount to slavery, @PaulSkallas). Take the construction worker who takes an extra risk burden. My guess is that few such men receive the rewards of that risk in the way consistent with their dignity.
(7) The risk he takes on is not a glorious one, nor it is one associated with the fulfillment of his own life projects. It's a pure employment relationship taken on by necessity—the very fact that we talk about it in terms of money shows us that.
(8) So perhaps that's the simplest way to say why the proposal is (on consideration, as well as instinct) a repugnant one. It's a further extension of the domain of contemporary wage slavery. It appears out of the ordinary only because of its obvious violation of sacred values.
(9) Hard to overestimate the extent to which we'd adopted inconsistent positions on these questions. It's why, I think, the galaxy brain libertarian is so attractive to a certain personality. They're not wrong to see the inconsistency—just wrong in how they go about resolving it.
There's a fundamental unseriousness about the "pay for infection" people (as, again, pointed out by @nntaleb—no SiTG). At best, a kind of reasoning-in-drag, a parody played out for an audience who is in on the joke. Not actual thinking.
