There can be. Anyone halfway intelligent knows that you can have the intention of using the money to do something nice.

But that's a trivial angle for reasons I already pointed out.

If, instead of 500k, when you hit the kid something magical happened that cured infant AIDS, then you'd have something.

pvn doesn't even have very many posts. I think of him as like an amateur enthusiast poster, not a real professional

How about a hypothetical where you are given the opportunity to go back in time and serve as a prison guard at Buchenwald and if you earn commendations in your file from your commanders then when you return to the present a cure for cancer will magically present itself, but magic will also prevent you from changing the course of history during your travels in time.

Work in banging your own grandmother in a rain soaked Polish potato field in order to repair the brittle O-rings on the Challenger and we might get somewhere.

...

OP?

You went with "sure, sign me up."

Not sure if pointed out but money is a zero-sum game so it makes a difference whether the $50M (obv not doing it for $500k) is coming from the pockets of everyone, all the sick kids' families in the world, or the 1%.

Yeah, Pvn pointed that out. But actually that's not true. Wealth is created in this world through focused work. But either way, we can still set up the hypothetical here to have the $500GG shipped in from the Andromeda galaxy of we want in the form of resources or stored energy.

well yeah, you could change the hypothetical to something other than what the OP asked and yeah, in that case, my analysis of the scenario actually posed in the OP would no longer apply. good job guys.

I'm probably naively hoping we can move on from the hostility.

These sorts of 'choice based' threads have been coming up for best part of decade and although like you and some others I like to considering the whole picture we also take as read that its not the (sole) intent of these OPs.

Otherwise tread carefully, more powerful people than Bruce have been known to make death threats.

Its up to you as well.

Its like a toy version of serious conflicts. Any peace process requires strength of character by its supporters in the face of continued atrocities and those determined to derail it.

Its no biggie either way but still I hope a little.

Except that you are still making exactly the same stupid mistake. Anyone with even the slightest bit of education knows that giving a hungry person food has a different marginal utility than giving a full person food and that me giving you a can of soup does not increase the total world supply of soup.

Print the money, ship it in from outer space, whatever.

That would really change the op. Now you're a criminal and might have precipitated IW1

It does matter. If we're transferring the soup, yes, the hungry person gets the soup but it also means someone else is not going to get that soup.

If we move the money from some other people, the things they were going to spend it on are now pushed back until they can replace that cash. That has an effect that can't just be ignored.

If the money is printed then the inflationary effect also has negative costs that can't be handwaved away.

You can't do a cost/benefit analysis where you only look at benefits and ignore costs. Well, you can, it's just incredibly stupid and completely useless.

On the point pvn is making he is definitely right and it matters because anyone who would justify their decision because they could add anything like 500k worth of good deeds with the money is making a sizable mistake.

its even worse when they're just trying to justify their greedy actions.

but is any of that the point of these ops?

No. Completely off topic.

JFI, dogmoon's personal attack has been deleted and all reference to it. A warning infraction has been sent. Dogmoon's joint date is 8/11/2014.

Who said $500k worth of good?

You are, I am sure, quite we'll aware that the marginal utility of your millionth dollar is not even close to your tenth.

500k was just the amount in the op.

marginal utility doesn't really apply as at this level we can do approx n times as much good with 500k as we can with 500k/n (ignoring frictional costs). But every $ spent on good deeds doesn't add a $ worth of good deeds because some of it would have done some good anyway (there's an assumption in there that seems fair enough but we could imagine worlds where taking 500k to spend on good deeds adds more than 500k's worth of good deeds)

The increased inflation in soup prices will be approximately zero. Giving pvn the benefit of the doubt, perhaps $499k worth of soup-happiness benefit could be obtained from the $500k.

Of course, in the actual world, you would expect that the newly fed bellies would do nice things multiplying the effect. Or you could do the smart thing and purchase things that have a more lasting effect, such as a well.

Of course, I still chose to not run over the baby. I have hit birds and a deer before and that is gross.

The question was simply if you would be willing to risk the potential psychological implications of a total no fault accident where you run over a child for 500K. It is simply a question of how your see your mind reacting to the situation.

If you start with the idea that nobody would want to be involved in a no fault accident where a child was killed, you then ask yourself at what monetary point would you be willing to risk your mental state.

All of this other stuff is uninteresting and immaterial. This is simply a question of how much do you trust your ability to predict how your mind would react, and would it be worth it?

By NO FAULT, it means that any arguments about choosing the death of a child are invalid. So, for the premise, the child is going to get run over by someone anyways. For me, I don't want that in my head for any sum. What you would do with the 500K is a personal issue, and nobody really cares. Of course, that would factor into your decision, but greater good arguments are uninteresting. This is a question about putting a traumatic event into your head for life.

I guess you could state it like this. Imagine that your neighbor accidentally runs over a child and the child dies. How much would he have to pay you to put that event/experience into your head and remove it from his? The mind is a powerful thing. At a certain dollar amount, people are willing to risk their mental state, which is really all that anyone has on this earth.

Use the 500k after the horrible but as OP modified unavoidable now death of the kid, that you take it upon yourself to do it, to go to a 3rd world country with illegal medical research to clone the kid from its blood at the scene. Fund with that 500k the cloning and whatever is left give it for the kid's education. I am quite sure cloning for humans is very doable right now and all the ethical bs oppositions are exactly that, bs (for an isolated event i mean) assuming the embryo doesnt have defects.

Its not the same depending on the age of the kid already but at least you give that DNA another chance. So i choose to run it for precisely this reason because the others wont do it likely.

PS1: Still thinking of a physics loophole out of it though lol

PS2: accept as much money as the cloning and the rest will take, so raise if needed.

PS3: You also raise the kid yourself so you try to have vested interest.

sorry for confusion. I wasn't referring to your outer-space money printing response. I deal with that in the I*W1 post. *Intergalactic

Just the general point that you cant justify getting paid 500k (in the normal way) for something bad by thinking you can then add 500k worth of good.

I'd didn't delve deeper than that cos its so OT but obv' you can argue you're making somewhat better use of the existing wealth.