Sacrifice vs. Uncertainty

     For some reason, in my fiction writing at least, I can't stop writing about the idea of sacrifice. Maybe it is my Irish Catholic upbringing, or maybe it was the fact that I've read a lot of Cioran, but regardless the idea intrigues me endlessly. Here is my question:

    Would you take a bullet for democracy in the United States? You get shot in the chest, you may or may not live.

    If you don't take the bullet, the US becomes a dictatorship of North Korean proportions. If you jump in front of the bullet, nothing changes in the US. There are plenty of interesting derivations to this question. Maybe you throw in that democracy falls in 100 years, so you and your family will be fine. Or you change the prompt to reflect some other cause. Well, many American soldiers have lost their lives fighting for certain American ideals, democracy being the foremost. Probably the coolest part of the US is our history of standing up against tyranny, and taking a look at the world stage shows us as mostly alone. It's pretty crazy to me that the American experiment actually worked, and I don't see any obvious civilizational collapse on the horizon despite what the media says. I'm taking the bullet. Now, what I find actually interesting about this question is the introduction of uncertainty. If you set the odds for either of these, at 95%, or 5%, you can probably get some widely inconsistent and interesting answers.

    Would you take a 5% chance of dying to prevent a 95% chance of democracy collapsing? Would you take a 95% chance of dying to prevent a 5% chance of democracy collapsing? What about 50% and 50%?

    Now, shift those numbers on each side until you get something noteworthy. Personally, I think introducing odds into anything causes humans to lock up and focus on self-preservation. I doubt many people would take their own life to prevent a 40% chance of a family member dying, even if we traditionally valued that family members' life at multiples of our own. This is one of the problems with altruism, and one of the problems with effective donations. Basically, the problem is we don't really know what is going to happen. Even if we are pretty sure our donation money will go to cure someone of a preventable disease, maybe that leads to knock-on effects (they grow up and become bad, overpopulation, the money is stolen and used to buy weapons). Even if the odds of such bad outcomes are extremely low, we become extremely adverse to donating. Maybe I want to donate to AI alignment research, but there is some low probability I make the problem worse. In fact, I really have no idea what will make the problem worse and what will make the problem better. Even if the odds of the money being useful is 80%, that 20% scares me to an irrational level.

    What does this mean? I think it means that research into how effective certain causes are is actually extremely useful. Removing the uncertainty regarding charitable causes might actually be the most impactful contribution of EA, because by doing so we can finally convince people to make a small sacrifice.