Sunburn risk without shared sunscreen seems a bit too high; do 30% of people at such concerts get sunburnt?
I recently got a sunburn, and I was thinking about the daly weight. A DALY improvement of 0.1 would mean prefering the experience of 9 days without a sunburn over 10 days with a sunburn seems… ¿reasonable? But also something confuses me here.
A DALY improvement of 0.1 would mean prefering the experience of 9 days without a sunburn over 10 days with a sunburn seems… ¿reasonable? But also something confuses me here.
Initially I thought this was unreasonably high, since e.g. lower back pain has a disability weight of ~0.035. But if we try an estimate based on GiveWell valuing 37 DALY as much as 116 consumption doublings, preventing the loss of 0.1 DALYs would be equivalent to a ~24% increase in consumption for 1 year. Daily, it would mean ~$20 for a person making $30k/year. This seems surprisingly reasonable for sunburn, given that I don’t think these numbers are meant to be used this way.
I wonder if this equivalence of ~24% income per 0.1 disability weight is totally off (as many of these things are clearly non-linear), or can be used for similar estimates.
I skipped over a factor there: I expect 1/2-2/3 of people to already have sunscreen in their group and likely using their own instead of a random one given by a stranger (probably also somewhat lower quality as we bought a generic brand for in this calculation). But whoever does not use the sunscreen is also not part of the cost calculation. The 30% is the sunburn risk of those who would use the shared sunscreen. If my 1/2-2/3 having sunscreen in their group assumption is correct and 30% of those that do not get a sunburn, you would expect 10-15% of people to have a sunburn at the end of such an event, of those being there early with you in the queue. Lots of people also come later in the evening, which decreases the fraction of people with sunburn you’ld see further.
I might be a bit off here, but the 0.035 for lower back pain seems a bit low. I think most people offered to have another day in the month but lower back pain the whole month would decline. On the other hand I’m pretty sure that most people with lower back pain would take the trade the other way. I also found this for GBD 2017, which would be a mean DW across the varieties of low back pain of around 0.11. The 0.035 would seem like a reasonable weight for the median “back pain” but not for the mean including more severe cases which is closer to my association with the term “low back pain”. Table in the link:
1/2-2/3 of people to already have sunscreen in their group and likely using their own
Yeah, good point; on the back of my mind I would have been inclined to model this not as the sunscreen going to those who don’t have it, but as having some chance of going to people who would otherwise have had their own.
True, I think I’ll change the 30,50,20 (would be sunburned, would have gotten it elsewhere, would have stayed in shadow) to 20,60,20 (would be sunburned, used own or gotten elsewhere, stayed in shadow).
Nice!
Two comments:
Sunburn risk without shared sunscreen seems a bit too high; do 30% of people at such concerts get sunburnt?
I recently got a sunburn, and I was thinking about the daly weight. A DALY improvement of 0.1 would mean prefering the experience of 9 days without a sunburn over 10 days with a sunburn seems… ¿reasonable? But also something confuses me here.
Initially I thought this was unreasonably high, since e.g. lower back pain has a disability weight of ~0.035. But if we try an estimate based on GiveWell valuing 37 DALY as much as 116 consumption doublings, preventing the loss of 0.1 DALYs would be equivalent to a ~24% increase in consumption for 1 year. Daily, it would mean ~$20 for a person making $30k/year. This seems surprisingly reasonable for sunburn, given that I don’t think these numbers are meant to be used this way.
I wonder if this equivalence of ~24% income per 0.1 disability weight is totally off (as many of these things are clearly non-linear), or can be used for similar estimates.
Thanks for the feedback! About the comments:
I skipped over a factor there: I expect 1/2-2/3 of people to already have sunscreen in their group and likely using their own instead of a random one given by a stranger (probably also somewhat lower quality as we bought a generic brand for in this calculation). But whoever does not use the sunscreen is also not part of the cost calculation. The 30% is the sunburn risk of those who would use the shared sunscreen. If my 1/2-2/3 having sunscreen in their group assumption is correct and 30% of those that do not get a sunburn, you would expect 10-15% of people to have a sunburn at the end of such an event, of those being there early with you in the queue. Lots of people also come later in the evening, which decreases the fraction of people with sunburn you’ld see further.
I might be a bit off here, but the 0.035 for lower back pain seems a bit low. I think most people offered to have another day in the month but lower back pain the whole month would decline. On the other hand I’m pretty sure that most people with lower back pain would take the trade the other way. I also found this for GBD 2017, which would be a mean DW across the varieties of low back pain of around 0.11. The 0.035 would seem like a reasonable weight for the median “back pain” but not for the mean including more severe cases which is closer to my association with the term “low back pain”. Table in the link:
Yeah, good point; on the back of my mind I would have been inclined to model this not as the sunscreen going to those who don’t have it, but as having some chance of going to people who would otherwise have had their own.
True, I think I’ll change the 30,50,20 (would be sunburned, would have gotten it elsewhere, would have stayed in shadow) to 20,60,20 (would be sunburned, used own or gotten elsewhere, stayed in shadow).