Separately in the linked Holden blog post it seems that the comparison is made between 100 large impacts and 10,000 small impacts that are well under 1% as large. I.e. the hypothetical compares larger total and per beneficiary impacts against a smaller total benefit distributed over more beneficiaries.
That’s not a good illustration for anti-aggregationism.
(2) Provide consistent, full nutrition and health care to 100 people, such that instead of growing up malnourished (leading to lower height, lower weight, lower intelligence, and other symptoms) they spend their lives relatively healthy. (For simplicity, though not accuracy, assume this doesn’t affect their actual lifespan – they still live about 40 years.)
This sounds like improving health significantly, e.g. 10% or more, over 14,600 days each, or 1.46 million days total. Call it 146,000 disability-adjusted life-days.
(3) Prevent one case of relatively mild non-fatal malaria (say, a fever that lasts a few days) for each of 10,000 people, without having a significant impact on the rest of their lives.
Let’s say mild non fatal malaria costs half of a life-day per day, and ‘a few days’ is 6 days. Then the stakes for these 10,000 people are 30,000 disability-adjusted life-days.
146,000 adjusted life days is a lot more than 30,000 adjusted life-days.
Separately in the linked Holden blog post it seems that the comparison is made between 100 large impacts and 10,000 small impacts that are well under 1% as large. I.e. the hypothetical compares larger total and per beneficiary impacts against a smaller total benefit distributed over more beneficiaries.
That’s not a good illustration for anti-aggregationism.
This sounds like improving health significantly, e.g. 10% or more, over 14,600 days each, or 1.46 million days total. Call it 146,000 disability-adjusted life-days.
Let’s say mild non fatal malaria costs half of a life-day per day, and ‘a few days’ is 6 days. Then the stakes for these 10,000 people are 30,000 disability-adjusted life-days.
146,000 adjusted life days is a lot more than 30,000 adjusted life-days.
This is true. Still, for many people, intuitions against aggregation seem to stand up even if the number of people with mild ailments increases without limit (millions, billions, and beyond). For some empirical evidence, see http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/55883/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Voorhoeve,%20A_How%20should%20we%20aggregate_Voorhoeve_How%20should%20we%20aggregate_2014.pdf