This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
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A real-world example of Parfit's Hitchhiker was prominently in the news recently, about firefighters that watched a guy's house burn down because didn't buy a subscription, even though he offered to pay when they arrived at the scene (which I assume means with all the penalties for serving a non-member, etc.). The parallel to PH became clear from this exchange with a writer on Salon:
Obviously, this doesn't carry over the "perfect predictor" aspect, but I'm guessing the FD's decision maker could do much better than chance in guessing whether they'd be able to recover the money -- and the homeowner suffered as a result of not being able to credibly tell the FD (which, of course, has its own subjunctive decision-theoretic concerns about "if I put out the fires of non-payers when they ...") that he would pay later.
(Sorry if this has been posted already, and let me know if this belongs somewhere else like the new discussion forum.)
Update: Okay, it looks like details are in dispute -- by some accounts, he wasn't offering the penalty rate, and people dispute whether the nonpayment was deliberate or an oversight (and the evidence strongly favors the former). "You'll say anything", indeed.
I see here a Newcomb-like situation, but in the reverse direction - the fire department didn't help the guy out to counterfactually make him pay his $75.