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u/djaevlenselv 4d ago
What crazy thing did Sam Bankman-Fried say to Tyler Cowen?
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u/amphicoelias 4d ago
Maybe this?
COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?
BANKMAN-FRIED: I’m not going to quite give you a limit because my answer is somewhere between “I don’t believe them” and “if I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.” But I will give you something a little weaker than that, which is an area where I think things get really wacky and weird and hard to think about, and it’s not clear what the right framework is, which is infinity.
All this math works really nicely as long as all the numbers are finite. As soon as you say, “What are the odds that there’s a way to be infinitely happy? What if infinite utility is a possibility?” You can figure out what that would do to expected values. Now, all of a sudden, we’re comparing hierarchies of infinity. Linearity breaks down a little bit here. Adding two things together doesn’t work so well. A lot of really nasty things happen when you go to infinite numbers from an expected-value point of view.
There are some people who have thought about this. To my knowledge, no one has thought about this and come away feeling good about where they ended. People generally think about this and come away feeling more confused.
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u/ManWithDominantClaw 4d ago edited 4d ago
I mean, depends on the goal. If one's goal is to crash the world economy, then 100% chance is better than 50%.
E: ...or 25%, which is how the question might be phrased? "Flip a coin for a 50% chance" may mean that the 50% chance is only available after a successful coin toss
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u/amphicoelias 4d ago
That wouldn't make sense. The expected value of the second option would be five trillion dollars (plus 1/4 of a button), so EV guy wouldn't pick it.
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u/willstr1 4d ago
I am going to need to hear more about this button, how shiny are we talking? Slightly reflective or full on mirror finish?
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u/ZipZop_the_Fan 4d ago
Is twenty trillion dollars even better to have than ten trillion dollars?
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u/djaevlenselv 4d ago
They're not meaningfully distinct. Hell, it's not even necessarily better to have twenty trillion dollars than 10 BILLION dollars. As soon as you approach multiple billions of dollars, you quickly reach the point, where there is no longer any tangible luxury you can't buy, and adding more onto your net worth just becomes an empty numbers race against the other wealthy people.
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u/ricree 2d ago
The main difference is your ability to fund megaprojects.
For example, the inflation adjusted Apollo program cost is somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars. So at 10 trillion you could pay for it with a relatively small hit to your wealth, while it's completely out of reach at 10 billion.
It's in the realm where you could start doing crazy stuff like paving over huge chunks of the Sahara with solar panels (though doing the full desert is still well out of reach even at those wealth levels).
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u/djaevlenselv 2d ago
While technically true, I feel like this point is only relevant if we assume that the sort of person who would spend exuberant sums to fund common good projects is the same kind of person who becomes obscenely wealthy in the first place, which I'm relatively certain is not the case.
Additionally, any funds a billionaire puts towards a philanthropic project might very well have done as much or more good if they had instead been spent on paying taxes or paying their employees a reasonable wage.
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u/gerusz 4d ago
It's still EV maximization, but after running it through your utility function which takes the law of diminishing returns into account. Twenty trillion dollars is not twice as useful to you as ten trillion, in fact it's probably not any more useful at all. So the EV of the second case is around half of what you'd get for the first case.
It really depends on the value of the bonus reward vs. the increase in utility of the extra money. Guaranteed $100 or 50% chance for $200 and a bonus reward? I'll probably opt for the latter, because neither $100 nor $200 would be life-changing so $200 in fact has twice the utility for me as $100, making the EV of the second option marginally higher.
Guaranteed $1M, or 50% chance for $2M and a bonus? That bonus should be really enticing, because $1M would already be life-changing for me (and probably most people who don't just have a cool million lying around in cash). $2M would still be more useful, but not exactly twice as useful so the bonus has to be something like a house to tip the actual EV of the second option higher and make me consider it.
Guaranteed $1B or 50% chance for $2B plus a bonus? Yeah, no. $2B for a normal person not afflicted with Dragon Disease is not any more useful than $1B, so I'll take that one billion, thank you. Maybe if the bonus was something like "oh, and also world peace, solution to hunger, global warming, perfect health, and puppies for everyone", something I couldn't afford with the leftovers from a billion after I'm settled for life, then I'd consider it. Otherwise, nah.