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領(lǐng)域不敏感性 ?-by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2,000 / 20,000 / 200,000 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.

很久以前，有三組受測者被問到他們愿意被支付多少去救2000/20000/200000只還在未被還有污染棲息的候鳥。這幾組的受測者分別分大了80美元，78美元和88.1美元。這是一種范圍不敏感性和范圍忽視：被救鳥兒的數(shù)量——在利他行為的范疇中——很少會影響到支付意愿。

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, 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.People visualize “a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape.”3 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 2,000 birds at once, let alone 200,000. 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. This hypothesis is known as “valuation by prototype.”

類似的實驗表明：即使只比僅僅清理一片區(qū)污染區(qū)的居民多支付很少一點報仇，清理所有被污染片區(qū)的多倫多居民仍然是愿意的，美國西部地區(qū)的四個州的居民清理本州的57個片區(qū)即使被支付比平常報酬的28%多一些些，他們的意愿程度仍然遠遠高于僅僅清理單一片區(qū)的居民。

An alternative hypothesis is “purchase of moral satisfaction.” People spend enough money to create a warm glow in themselves, a sense of having done their duty. The level of spending needed to purchase a warm glow depends on personality and financial situation, but it certainly has nothing to do with the number of birds.

有一個可以用來解釋的理論是“道德舒適度的購買”。人們花費一定的錢去創(chuàng)造他們自身的熱忱形象，這是他們所有的一種義務(wù)職責(zé)感覺。被需要去購買一種道德舒適度的報酬水平完全取決于個人和金融狀況，但鳥兒的數(shù)量確實起不了太多的作用。

We are insensitive to scope even when human lives are at stake: Increasing the alleged risk of chlorinated drinking water from 0.004 to 2.43 annual deaths per 1,000—a factor of 600—increased willingness-to-pay from $3.78 to $15.23 Baron and Greene found no effect from varying lives saved by a factor of 10.5

甚至當(dāng)人的生命處于岌岌可危的狀況的時候，我們對于數(shù)量也并不敏感：將據(jù)稱的氯化飲用水風(fēng)險從每1000人中每年0.004人增加到2.43人——原來的600倍——支付意愿從3.78美元增加到15.23美元。Baron和Greene發(fā)現(xiàn)，即使是挽救了原來生命數(shù)量的10.5倍仍然沒有任何影響。

A paper entitled “Insensitivity to the value of human life: A study of psychophysical numbing” collected evidence that our perception of human deaths follows Weber’s Law—obeys a logarithmic scale where the “just noticeable difference” is a constant fraction of the whole. A proposed health program to save the lives of Rwandan refugees garnered far higher support when it promised to save 4,500 lives in a camp of 11,000 refugees, rather than 4,500 in a camp of 250,000. A potential disease cure had to promise to save far more lives in order to be judged worthy of funding, if the disease was originally stated to have killed 290,000 rather than 160,000 or 15,000 people per year.

一篇題為“對人類生命價值不敏感：對心理物理麻木的研究”的論文收集了證據(jù)，證明我們對人類死亡的看法遵循韋伯定律——服從對數(shù)刻度，其中“只是明顯的差異”是整體的恒定部分。一項挽救盧旺達南明生命的擬議健康計劃獲得了更高的支持，它承諾在11000名難民的難民營中挽救4500人的生命，而不是在250000人的生命。潛在的疾病治愈必須承諾挽救更多的生命，才能被判定為值得資助的，如果這種疾病最初說成每年殺死29萬人而不是16萬人或者15000人。

The moral: If you want to be an effective altruist, you have to think it through with the part of your brain that processes those unexciting inky zeroes on paper, not just the part that gets real worked up about that poor struggling oil-soaked bird.

有這么一個結(jié)論：如果你想成為一個有效的利他主義者，你必須用你大腦中處理紙上那些令人不快的墨水零的部分來思考，而不僅僅是對那只可憐的掙扎的油浸鳥真正感到興奮。