Quote Originally Posted by kiwiMark View Post
I always hated it when, when we were playing the what's your price game, the one friend in high school would name ridiculous full of shit prices like "one million dollars" for, say, taking it up the ass. I say this because I think there are people who, for some reason, are unable/unwilling to take hypotheticals seriously and judge even halfway accurately how they'd behave, and I don't think I fall so strongly into that group (although who can say how well they know themselves, I guess).

I think pressing the button for ten cents has to already be +EV, because (as an atheist or whatever) there is no negative consequence to pushing the button that I can see.

I still maintain that I would not/could not push that button with a 1% chance of death. I guess the only reasoning I can offer up is along the same line as wufwugy's -- clearly we've evolved to have an aversion to risking death or we wouldn't still be here. Maybe a better question for me would be setting a fixed price and lowering the 1% death chance as the variable until there's a small enough chance that I'd be willing to push the button. Thinking about it right now though, I think I find it really really hard to nail down any kind of answer to that.




I'd also say (although maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough, it's late) that I don't believe I'm at all at high risk of ever dying from lack of money, nor being forced by lack of money into a job/situation where I'm risking immediate death in exchange for money (as in your solider or highrise construction worker examples), which means that pushing the button wouldn't be a case of same shit different odds for me - I'm not at any point balancing death against life but rather I'm balancing death against (what I hold to be fairly minor) improvements to my quality of life.

I think it's more of a social thing with those questions. If people have no fear of judgement or true reprisal for answering the questions, just about everyone will find an honest answer.

But you and I are of a mind on this one.

If I die, I die. All of my houses are in order and even if they weren't, I'd be too dead to care.

But there is much to do and many children to have and that makes me vested in protecting my life against any material cost.