Scope Insensitivity -by Eliezer Yudkowsky

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领域不敏感性  -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，有三组受测者被问到他们愿意被支付多少去救2000/20000/200000只还在未被还有污染栖息的候鸟。这几组的受测者分别分大了80美元，78美元和88.1美元。这是一种范围不敏感性和范围忽视：被救鸟儿的数量——在利他行为的范畴中——很少会影响到支付意愿。

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.”

类似的实验表明：即使只比仅仅清理一片区污染区的居民多支付很少一点报仇，清理所有被污染片区的多伦多居民仍然是愿意的，美国西部地区的四个州的居民清理本州的57个片区即使被支付比平常报酬的28%多一些些，他们的意愿程度仍然远远高于仅仅清理单一片区的居民。

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.

有一个可以用来解释的理论是“道德舒适度的购买”。人们花费一定的钱去创造他们自身的热忱形象，这是他们所有的一种义务职责感觉。被需要去购买一种道德舒适度的报酬水平完全取决于个人和金融状况，但鸟儿的数量确实起不了太多的作用。

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

甚至当人的生命处于岌岌可危的状况的时候，我们对于数量也并不敏感：将据称的氯化饮用水风险从每1000人中每年0.004人增加到2.43人——原来的600倍——支付意愿从3.78美元增加到15.23美元。Baron和Greene发现，即使是挽救了原来生命数量的10.5倍仍然没有任何影响。

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.

一篇题为“对人类生命价值不敏感：对心理物理麻木的研究”的论文收集了证据，证明我们对人类死亡的看法遵循韦伯定律——服从对数刻度，其中“只是明显的差异”是整体的恒定部分。一项挽救卢旺达南明生命的拟议健康计划获得了更高的支持，它承诺在11000名难民的难民营中挽救4500人的生命，而不是在250000人的生命。潜在的疾病治愈必须承诺挽救更多的生命，才能被判定为值得资助的，如果这种疾病最初说成每年杀死29万人而不是16万人或者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.

有这么一个结论：如果你想成为一个有效的利他主义者，你必须用你大脑中处理纸上那些令人不快的墨水零的部分来思考，而不仅仅是对那只可怜的挣扎的油浸鸟真正感到兴奋。