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TheOtherDave comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I think a key part of the question, as I see it, is to formalize the difference between treatment effects and selection effects (in the context where your actions might reflect a selection effect, and we can't make the normally reasonable assumption that our actions result in treatment effects). An oracle could look into the future, find a list of people who will die in the next week, and a list of people who would pay them $1000 if presented with this prompt, and present the prompt to the exclusive or of those two lists. This doesn't give anyone QALYs they wouldn't have had otherwise.
And so I find my intuitions are guided mostly by the identification of the prompter as an "oracle" instead of a "wizard" or "witch." Oracle implies selection effect; wizard or witch implies treatment effect.
Leaving aside lexical questions about the connotations of the word "oracle", I certainly agree that if the entity's accuracy represents a selection effect, then my reasoning doesn't hold.
Indeed, I at least intended to say as much explicitly (_"I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer." _ ) in my comment.
That said, it's entirely possible that I misread what the point of DanielLC's hypothetical was.
DanielLC said:
I interpreted that as a selection effect, so my answer recommended not paying. Now I realize that it may not be entirely a selection effect. Maybe the oracle is also finding people whose life would be saved by making them $1000 poorer, for various exotic reasons. But if the probability of that is small enough, my answer stays the same.
Right. Your reading is entirely sensible, and more likely in "the real world" (by which I mean something not-well-thought-through about how it's easier to implement the original description as a selection effect), I merely chose to bypass that reading and go with what I suspected (perhaps incorrectly) the OP actually had in mind.