Thanks for the additional readings. I think Paul Dolan is asking the right questions. I am disappointed that after a promising initial discussion eight years ago, Holden doesn’t seem to have spoken again on the subject and to the best of my knowledge there is still no way on GiveWell to put different weights on “impact” to give different results.
I don’t understand your last paragraph though. DALYs don’t seem to measure economic effects on others at all, so if you do start to consider them wouldn’t that be a big argument to make some DALYs negative?
Sorry, I didn’t communicate what I meant well there.
It might be the case that DALYs somewhat faithfully track both (a) the impact of conditions on subjective wellbeing and (b) the impact of conditions on economic contribution, even if they’re not explicitly intended to track (b). It might also be the case that efforts to extend DALYs to more faithfully track (a) for things that are worse than death would mean that they tracked (b) less well in those cases.
Then, it could be the case that it’s better to stick with the current way of doing things.
I don’t actually think the above is particularly likely (and yet less so after writing it out) and even in the case that it captures something correct for some moral frameworks, it probably looks different under others.
Thanks for the additional readings. I think Paul Dolan is asking the right questions. I am disappointed that after a promising initial discussion eight years ago, Holden doesn’t seem to have spoken again on the subject and to the best of my knowledge there is still no way on GiveWell to put different weights on “impact” to give different results.
I don’t understand your last paragraph though. DALYs don’t seem to measure economic effects on others at all, so if you do start to consider them wouldn’t that be a big argument to make some DALYs negative?
Sorry, I didn’t communicate what I meant well there.
It might be the case that DALYs somewhat faithfully track both (a) the impact of conditions on subjective wellbeing and (b) the impact of conditions on economic contribution, even if they’re not explicitly intended to track (b). It might also be the case that efforts to extend DALYs to more faithfully track (a) for things that are worse than death would mean that they tracked (b) less well in those cases.
Then, it could be the case that it’s better to stick with the current way of doing things.
I don’t actually think the above is particularly likely (and yet less so after writing it out) and even in the case that it captures something correct for some moral frameworks, it probably looks different under others.