Imagine a game show. You get isolated in a room with a bomb on a table and a random number generator hooked up to the detonator. And a camera, of course. You’re made an offer: the random number generator will create a number - a percentage chance that the will trigger the bomb. On the other end of the offer an amount of money you’d win if it doesn’t go off. You win nothing for your family if you die.
What numbers could you be offered and find acceptable?
You might say you’d decline to play at all, but to most people it’s a matter of degree - you’d take a 1 percent chance at death for a billion dollars, wouldn’t you?
But where do you draw the line? Would you take a 5 percent risk for $100,000? A 10 percent risk for a million? There’s no reason your boundaries have to be linear - you could demand $50k for 1% and 10 million for 10% if you were so inclined.
Me, I’m probably much more willing to take the risk than the average person. I have no dependents and I’m not that averse to fatal risk. So I’d probably do:
1% for $30k
3% for $100k
5% for $200k
10% for $600k
15% for $1.2m
20% for $3.5m
25% for $10m
And that’s probably as high as I’d go.
In your answer, you don’t have to follow my pattern. Answer however you’d like.
Mm, I might take an extremely small risk for a huge payoff, say 1% for a couple million, but in reality I probably wouldn’t even do that. I have too much fun doing stuff on a meager salary to take even a tiny risk like that. Of course, now that I think about it, maybe by snowboarding I have a higher percentage than 1% of dying, so maybe the 1% thing wouldn’t be so bad.
Probably make for a pretty boring game show if I were on it.
I know this really isn’t the point of your hypothetical, but in accordance with the principles of the current crop of game shows, your premise needs some work.
The way it would go is that first you choose your percentage. There would have to be a lot of dicking around with a compere who would try to increase the percentage gamble you take. There would be a lot of shots of your family crying and so on. Then you’d push the button. The bomb wouldn’t go off straight away. You’d have to find out you going to die well before you actually do so, so that the camera could leer at your distress endlessly, and the compere can ask you how you feel. And then probably you’d have the option of another gamble, probably involving more money in exchange for a chance that one of your children get killed as well, in front of your eyes perhaps. And if you lose that one they can show hours of footage of your wife’s anguish.
Hmm, this hypothetical seems even more interesting to me because it has overtones of humanitarian ethical quandary. Even if you personally wouldn’t want to take a 1% chance of death for nine zillion gajillion dollars, isn’t it your moral imperative to take it and use the money to save countless others’ lives?
I love to gamble. But not with my life. You could make it 0.000000001% chance and I still wouldn’t do it for a billion - some things are more important than money.
The average person would be gambling with their life at odds much worse than that to make far less money every day they walk out their front door to go to work.
I see this as more of a philosophical statement of some sort rather than an actual reaction. I think faced with the actual prospect you just proposed, there’s pretty much no one that would actually turn it down.
And what would be the reasoning? Even if your idea is that life is so precious that a ridiculously large amount of money still doesn’t compare to even a tiny chance of ending it, what about the medical care you’ll receive with all that money that will let you live longer and healthier? Then, even not factoring in other uses for the money, you expect to gain lots of life on average by taking this gamble.
But having that kind of money allows you freedom - you’ll pretty much never have to do anything you don’t want to do again. So what about the life you gain by not having to do unpleasant things more than offsets the potential life lost by such a small chance. Thousands of hours toiling away at various chores in your lifetime could instead be spent on any pursuit you wished.
I’d imagine you regularly take risks in life that have a greater chance than that in resulting in death - maybe a road trip to someone a few hours away has a higher chance of killing you than that - so cancel the road trip, sit with the bomb, and you take less risk and you guarantee that you’ll get the best medical care, free yourself of burdens, and give the same priviledge to anyone you care about.
I can’t really buy your position as reasonable. I can’t see a context in which it makes sense.
Why not just add the death element to prexisting shows? On Deal or No Deal there might be 10 $1m cases this week, but at the same time the banker can call down and tell Howie that he has to shoot you in the face with a pistol too. Better payoffs, more chance of death.
It’d certainly be a good chance to test the Quantum Immortality idea.
If I was single and had no dependents, I’d do it. Or, at least, I’d like to think I’d do it. After all, even if Quantum Immortality isn’t valid, you’d still never know if you failed. Well, assuming they don’t do the incredibly long and drawn-out Who Wants to be a Millionaire version- that would suck.
I think I’d take a 1 in 10,000 chance of death for as little as a hundred grand, but I wouldn’t want to take any chance higher than that for any amount of money.
But after the first season, they’d have to really up the ante to keep the ratings. How do you top it?
Here’s one suggestion: The contestants are poor or lower-middle-class parents with really sick or injured kids requiring millions of dollars to treat or cure them. Desperate to improve their situations, you could probably get mom or dad to go up against a 40% chance of slow, horrible, viewer-friendly death in exchange for the chance to win enough to cover Juniors medical bills. Throw in a family trip to Disney World as a consolation prize.
Or there is the Attention Whore version - up to a 25% risk of death in exchange for the chance to win a celebrity lifestyle for a year, complete with obsessive paprazzi al la Paris Hilton.
I can imagine taking an offer where the chance of dying was lower than the chance I would have died in those few minutes anyway. So lower than the chance of a major earthquake, meteor strike, a nearby massive car wreck launching vehicles at the room, and so on. Get the chance down that low (no idea how low that is) and I’ll take it for a few bucks.
But a one percent chance of dying? Not even if the payoff was a risk-free headship of the economy of the entire planet. Jesus Christ!
Increase those numbers by 50% and I’d take it. I don’t think I’d go over the 15%, though. Oddly enough, I’m not a gambler in general–I hate to gamble with money I already have. But I’m also not afraid of death, and the odds would be on my side.
I’m a low risk guy. If the odds of dying were as low as, say, winning the grand prize in the Power Ball, I would play. But I would take a cheap prize – maybe 5K. With odd of a billion to one against death, and 5k per try, I would try a bunch of times.
What I’d say I’d do on this message board and what I’d actually do on the game show are most likely entirely different. The pressure on that show would be intense I imagine, and it’s easy to sit and ponder now.
Personally, I like taking risks and gambling, but I have my family to think about, as long as the ethical ramifications of risking one’s life for money in a concrete act.
With that said, I choose to go with 10% for 10M, 9% for 9M, and so-on so-forth.
