You thought you were giving a child 35+ years of life and preventing parental suffering, but now you’re just (in effect) doing the former.
Do you mean the latter?
If parental suffering is equivalent to taking away 1 year of happy life away from each parent
I think we have very different intuitions here. I’d instantly give a year of my life to not watch my two-year-old daughter die, because I expect that 50 more years as a bereaved parent is worse than 49 years as the parent of a living child. I expect most parents would say the same (though of course social acceptability bias makes it more likely that parents will say that.) Also we may be getting into preference vs. hedonic utilitarianism here, not sure where I stand on that.
In general, though, this post does change the way I think about saving lives; thank you for writing it up.
I’d instantly give a year of my life to not watch my two-year-old daughter die, because I expect that 50 more years as a bereaved parent is worse than 49 years as the parent of a living child.
I would also do that, and probably be willing to do it at worse ratio (5 years, say).
There are also many situations where parents have given their lives to save their children, which is not coming from a “prefer shorter time with kids to longer time bereaved” assessment of their future.
Note that the GiveWell 2016 calculations allow us to take the amount of parental suffering into account—you can put your intuitions into the spreadsheet directly if you want.
I’d instantly give a year of my life to not watch my two-year-old daughter die
That’s plausible from an evo-psych perspective as well. Ignoring the parenting that you can do while pregnant, a pregnancy costs a woman 3⁄4 of a year of life, plus various health risks and increased nutritional demands. Child care during the first year of the baby’s life is also pretty costly. That probably adds up to more than 1 year of total cost just for the mother, and then some extra for the father, relatives, etc.
in response to your first point, yes I did mix those up.
And for the 2nd, I’m thinking hedonically and am leaning on the literature on hedonic adaptation. I’m not sure how to think about re-doing the calculations if I was using preferences util. So I think it’s consistent to say “I would give up much more than a year of life to keep my child alive” whilst recognising that few (any?) events have a long term impact on happiness, either positive or negative.
I think the results on ‘hedonic adaption’ are much less straightforward than you think they are. In general I’d caution against making strong claims that completely go against common sense about people’s preferences based on just reading a few studies.
Do you mean the latter?
I think we have very different intuitions here. I’d instantly give a year of my life to not watch my two-year-old daughter die, because I expect that 50 more years as a bereaved parent is worse than 49 years as the parent of a living child. I expect most parents would say the same (though of course social acceptability bias makes it more likely that parents will say that.) Also we may be getting into preference vs. hedonic utilitarianism here, not sure where I stand on that.
In general, though, this post does change the way I think about saving lives; thank you for writing it up.
I would also do that, and probably be willing to do it at worse ratio (5 years, say).
There are also many situations where parents have given their lives to save their children, which is not coming from a “prefer shorter time with kids to longer time bereaved” assessment of their future.
Note that the GiveWell 2016 calculations allow us to take the amount of parental suffering into account—you can put your intuitions into the spreadsheet directly if you want.
That’s plausible from an evo-psych perspective as well. Ignoring the parenting that you can do while pregnant, a pregnancy costs a woman 3⁄4 of a year of life, plus various health risks and increased nutritional demands. Child care during the first year of the baby’s life is also pretty costly. That probably adds up to more than 1 year of total cost just for the mother, and then some extra for the father, relatives, etc.
in response to your first point, yes I did mix those up.
And for the 2nd, I’m thinking hedonically and am leaning on the literature on hedonic adaptation. I’m not sure how to think about re-doing the calculations if I was using preferences util. So I think it’s consistent to say “I would give up much more than a year of life to keep my child alive” whilst recognising that few (any?) events have a long term impact on happiness, either positive or negative.
I think the results on ‘hedonic adaption’ are much less straightforward than you think they are. In general I’d caution against making strong claims that completely go against common sense about people’s preferences based on just reading a few studies.