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timtyler comments on Really Extreme Altruism - Less Wrong
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Offering insuring against sucicide seems pretty stupid to me. Like offering insurance against someone burning their own house down. So, presumably, this story is fictional.
I don't know of anyone who has actually done this, but it is indeed possible. At least in the United States, life insurance does cover death by suicide, as long as the policy was purchased two years before the suicide took place. Of course, the person purchasing the policy does have to disclose his medical history, including any past or ongoing treatment for depression, which insurers take into account when deciding how much to charge for a policy (or whether to offer one at all).
Yes, it's morbid, but I actually did the research on this; an otherwise healthy young man might be able to get a 10 year term life insurance policy with a payout of $1,000,000 for an annual premium of around $600 (and a $10 million policy for $6000).
I think, then, that the harm associated with this man's suicide would have to take into account the rise in premiums he would be forcing on people in similar situations. His death may increase the amount a similar man would have to pay, decreasing the likelihood that he could afford insurance and increasing the harm that man's death would cause his dependents. Over time, those effects could swamp any short-term benefit to the charity.
Or, if the behavior became common, insurance companies could simply decline to cover suicide. The problems would arise if, say, a car accident were accused of being a covert suicide (but wouldn't we have this same problem before the 2-year limit?) Perhaps that's why insurance companies cover suicides - for peace of mind, so that you know they won't accuse your corpse of having done it on purpose.
I think we can consider the harm associate with this man's suicide causing a rise in premiums to be relatively negligible, seeing as people have committed suicide while insured in the past, and it hasn't made prices so incredibly high as to stop insurance companies from being able to sell similar policies today.
Not only that, but he never generated the wealth in the first place. His savings were his, sure, but the rest of the money was essentially conned from the insurance company.
He did not make the world richer by sacrificing himself, he sacrificed himself to (dishonestly) reallocate resources.
I'd say support his actions iff you would support stealing to give to charity.
I don't see it as "conned" (or perhaps I'm inferring some connotations that you don't intend to imply by that word?): The man took "suicide-insurance". That is to say, he signed a contract with the insurance company saying something along the lines of "I'll pay you $X per month for the rest of my life. If I don't commit suicide for 2 years, but then commit suicide after that, then you have to give me 1 million dollars."
I'm sure the insurance company fully understood the terms of the contract (in fact, it is practically certain that it was the insurance company itself which wrote out the contract). The insurance company fully understood the terms of the deal and agreed to it. They employ actuaries and lawyers go over the draft of their contracts to ensure it means exactly what they think it means. No party was mislead or misunderstood the terms. So how is that a con?
I agree, I don't think it's a con. It only seems like a con because you are betting with the insurance company about the contents of your brain and most people naturally assume that they understand the contents of their own brain better than some outside agency.
However, I think that assumption is pretty clearly false. It seems that institutions have the benefit of a lot of past experience and can use that experience to understand people better (and predict their behavior better) than they understand or could predict themselves.
Most people could acquire much more near term wealth via insurance than via work but could not acquire more near term wealth via theft (expected value) than via work.
How was he dishonest?
Because he didn't disclose to the insurance company that he was planning to commit suicide at the time he took out the policy(!)
So? Not revealing info != dishonesty. Unless he signed a contract that stated that he had no intent to commit suicide, I don't think he ever lied.
Let's say I am a proficient at counting cards while playing blackjack. I go to the casino to gamble and walk away richer--consistently. This case is actually very similar to the insurance one, in that in both cases I am making a bet with some sort of large organization, and I know more about the nature of the bet than the large organization does.
Anyway, is the card counter dishonest? And if not, how is the man who commits suicide different?
Optimizing your decisions so that other people will form less accurate beliefs is dishonesty. Making literally false statements you expect other people to believe is just a special case of this.
If you decide not to reveal info because you predict that info will enable another person to accurately predict your behavior and decline to enter an agreement with you, you are being dishonest.
Hm, I wrote that comment two years ago. My new view is that it's not much worth arguing over the definition of "dishonesty" so figuring out whether the guy is "dishonest" or not is just a word game--we should figure out if others having correct beliefs is a terminal value to us, and if so, how it trades off against other terminal values. (Or perhaps individually not acting in ways that give others incorrect beliefs is a terminal value.)
As a consequentialist, I mostly say the ends justify the means. I am a little cautious due to the issues Eliezer discusses in this post, but I don't think I'm as cautious as Eliezer is--I have a fair amount of confidence in my ability to notice when my brain is going in to a failure mode like he describes.
I'm not entirely comfortable with this line of thinking. Drawing a distinction between withholding relevant information and providing false information is such a common feature of moral systems that I can't help but think any heuristic that eliminates the distinction is missing something important. It all has to reduce to normality, after all.
That said, biases do exist, and if we can come up with a plausible mechanism by which it'd be psychologically important without being consequentially important then I think I'd be happier with the conclusion. It might just come down to how difficult it is to prove.
I agree that a distinction should be drawn but I disagree about where. I think the morally important distinction is not between withholding information and providing false information, but why and in what context you are misleading the other person. If he's trying to violate your rights, for example, or if he's prying into something that's none of his business, then lie away. If you are trying to screw him over by misleading him, then you are getting into a moral gray area, or possibly worse.
The pragmatic distinction is that lies are easier to catch (or make common knowledge), so the lying must be done more carefully than mere withholding of relevant information. Seeing withholding of information as a moral right is a self-delusion part of normal hypocritic reasoning. Breaking it will make you a less effective hypocrite, all else equal.
Only if dogs have five legs if you call a tail a leg.
Optimising your decisions so that other people will form less accurate beliefs can only be legitimately construed as dishonest if you say or otherwise communicate that it is your intention to produce accurate beliefs.
That is how I feel.
Now I've thought more about it, if there's nothing in the agreement about suicide being intended at the time of application, then I think you're right.
I think of insurance policies as having clauses in about revealing any information that might affect the likelihood of a claim, but I can understand why that might not apply to life insurance policies.
The Straight Dope has looked at this: http://preview.tinyurl.com/apvljw