Historical note: his original blog post on it specifically used caffeine pills.

I have a terrible problem where I wake up from my alarm, turn off the alarm, then go back to sleep (I've missed several morning lectures this way). The solution I've been trialing is to put a glass of water and some caffeine pills on my bedside table when I go to sleep. That way, when I wake up I can turn off the alarm, take the pill and give in to the urge to put my head back on the pillow, confident that the caffeine will wake me up again a few minutes later. This has worked every time I've remembered to put out the pills.

I got this idea from someone else on LW but I've forgotten who, so credit to whomever it was.

Absolutely not worth the risk.

Many Western societies have seen pretty dramatic productivity-enhancing institutional changes in the last few hundred years that aren't explicable in terms of changes in genetic makeup.

Who said anything about genetics?

Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea seem to make a pretty strong case for a huge independent effect of institutions.

Korea is. China (I assume this is what you mean by Hong Kong and Singapore) is evidence against.

corruption, lack of infrastructure, and probably prejudice in Latin America

Why are these problems so much worse in Latin America? Probably a lot of it has to do with the character of the people there. Thus when he's in the country he's likely to do things that incrementally increase the problems he left Latin America to get away from.

I'm not sure what I'm should take away from that exchange.

But when you consider your subjective credence about the event "the next toss will come up heads", and integrate the conditional probabilities over the range of parameter values, what you end up with is a constant. No uncertainty.

Really? You can estimate your subjective credence without any uncertainty at all? You integration of the conditional probabilities over the range of parameter values involves only numbers you are fully certain about?

I don't believe you.

Approximately none of the decision theory corpus applies to this case

So this decision theory corpus is crippled and not very useful. Why should we care much about it?

So decision theory with imprecise credence is currently unsolved.

Yes, of course, but life in general is "unsolved" and you need to make decisions on a daily basis, not waiting for a proper decision theory to mature.

I think you overestimate the degree to which abstractions are useful when applied to reality.

You seem to want to describe a situation where I have uncertainty about probabilities, and hence uncertainty about expected values.

Correct.

there are no generally accepted theories (certainly not "plenty") for decision making with imprecise credence.

Really? Keep in mind that in reality people make decisions on the basis of "imprecise probabilities" all the time. In fact, outside of controlled experiments, it's quite unusual to know the precise probability because real-life processes are, generally speaking, not that stable.

It is very misleading to invoke diversification, risk premia, etc. as analogous or applicable to this discussion.

On the contrary, I believe it's very illuminating to apply these concepts to the topic under discussion.

I did mention finance which is a useful example because it's a field where people deal with imprecise probabilities all the time and the outcomes of their decisions are both very clear and very motivating. You don't imagine that when someone, say, characterizes a financial asset as having the expected return of 5% with 20% volatility, these probabilities are precise, do you?

You seem to want to describe a situation where I have uncertainty about probabilities, and hence uncertainty about expected values.

Correct.

there are no generally accepted theories (certainly not "plenty") for decision making with imprecise credence.

Really? Keep in mind that in reality people make decisions on the basis of "imprecise probabilities" all the time. In fact, outside of controlled experiments, it's quite unusual to know the precise probability because real-life processes are, generally speaking, not that stable.

It is very misleading to invoke diversification, risk premia, etc. as analogous or applicable to this discussion.

On the contrary, I believe it's very illuminating to apply these concepts to the topic under discussion.

I did mention finance which is a useful example because it's a field where people deal with imprecise probabilities all the time and the outcomes of their decisions are both very clear and very motivating. You don't imagine that when someone, say, characterizes a financial asset as having the expected return of 5% with 20% volatility, these probabilities are precise, do you?

takes us a bit afield, I think

If you're truly risk neutral you would discount all uncertainty to zero, the expected value is all that you'd care about.

my introspection really tells me that my expected QALY/$ for charity B is 1.1

You introspection tells you that you're uncertain. Your best guess is 1.1 but it's just a guess. The uncertainty is very high.

I don't know how else to make this decision.

Oh, there are plenty of ways, just look at finance. Here's a possible starting point.

I agree with Gelman that risk-aversion estimates from undergraduates don't make any financial sense.

Gelman's point has nothing to do with whether undergrads have any financial sense or not. Gelman's point is that treating risk aversion as solely a function of the curvature of the utility function makes no sense whatsoever -- for all humans.