In my last post, people complained about my stance that SENS was more deserving of money than the LA disabled charity LAHH. I have decided that the main reason for this could be scope insensitivity - the tendency to concentrate on the description of an effect, not the number attached to it:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.

Similar experiments showed that Toronto residents would pay little more to clean up all polluted lakes in Ontario than polluted lakes in a particular region of Ontario [2], or that residents of four western US states would pay only 28% more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in those states than to protect a single area [3].

People visualize "a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape" [4]. This image, or prototype, calls forth some level of emotional arousal that is primarily responsible for willingness-to-pay - and the image is the same in all cases. As for scope, it gets tossed out the window - no human can visualize 2000 birds at once, let alone 200000. The usual finding is that exponential increases in scope create linear increases in willingness-to-pay - perhaps corresponding to the linear time for our eyes to glaze over the zeroes; this small amount of affect is added, not multiplied, with the prototype affect.

So I have decided to re-write the post using unary notation for the numbers involved - a notation where the length number attached to the effect is in proportion to the size of the number, rather than to its logarithm.