Some people look at the magnitude of the probability and ignore the disutility ("Sure, it would be awful, but it's not going to happen, so who cares?").
It seems rather difficult to actually affect those people, though. The difference between P1=.04 and P1=.08 would have dramatic effects on an EV-calculator, but very little effect on the sort of person who judges probabilities by 'feel'.
That is, if I start out with a P1 confidence that I will be arrested and convicted for commiting a crime, a P2 confidence that if convicted I will receive significant prison time, and a >.99 confidence that the disutility of significant prison time is D1, and you want to double my expected disutility of commiting that crime, you can double P1, or P2, or D1, or mix-and-match.
I would suppose the D1 advocates would argue that the hidden costs of increasing P1 are higher than you think, or possibly they just value them more (e.g. the right to privacy). I admit I've never heard a good argument that what the US needs is to greatly increase the likelihood of sentencing a convict to significant prison time.
The difference between P1=.04 and P1=.08 would have dramatic effects on an EV-calculator, but very little effect on the sort of person who judges probabilities by 'feel'.
I would expect it depends a lot on the algorithms underlying "feel" and what aspects of the environment they depend on. It's unlikely these people are choosing their behaviors or beliefs at random, after all.
More generally, if I actually want to manipulate the behavior of a group, I should expect that a good first step is to understand how their behavior depends on aspects of...
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This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
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