{"id":361,"date":"2009-11-08T05:09:21","date_gmt":"2009-11-08T05:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/?p=361"},"modified":"2009-11-08T05:09:21","modified_gmt":"2009-11-08T05:09:21","slug":"would-unary-notation-prevent-scope-insensitivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/transhuman\/would-unary-notation-prevent-scope-insensitivity.php","title":{"rendered":"Would unary notation prevent scope insensitivity?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my <a href=\"http:\/\/transhumangoodness.blogspot.com\/2009\/08\/cure-aging-or-give-small-number-of.html\">last post<\/a>, 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/lesswrong.com\/lw\/hw\/scope_insensitivity\/\">scope insensitivity<\/a> - the tendency to concentrate on the description of an effect, not the number attached to it:<\/p><blockquote><p><i>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.<\/i><\/p><p>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].<\/p><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote><p>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.<\/p><div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/5d11b_7813164664144593334-2119500556849641317?l=transhumangoodness.blogspot.com\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/transhuman\/would-unary-notation-prevent-scope-insensitivity.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transhuman"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}