Former software entrepreneur, I now advise businesses, play the stock market, and attempt non-fiction writing
bfinn
Karma: 89
(Belatedly) Re trusting that people will do the work they say they will: in particular this illustrates that developers are notoriously unreliable & hard to manage (due to typical personality type). And unless they are very experienced, they underestimate how long development will take, by a factor of at least 2; because they fail to take into account the time required for specification, testing, bug-fixing, rewriting, documentation, management, admin, and unforeseen problems. Development is mostly not writing code, but doing these other things.
Additionally, R&D involves research as well as development to varying degrees, and this project required a fair bit of research (e.g. trial & error), as you weren’t sure what you were developing and what might work.
These are well-known, almost universal problems with software startups. In an established business they can be solved by management: hiring an experienced CTO and often also a project manager. With a startup it’s harder, unless a founder or lead developer has sufficient relevant experience. (An experienced advisor can help somewhat.)
Looks good from a quick read-through.
To make an obvious point, as relevant information (including about new charities/causes) will presumably improve a lot over the next 5 years, there seems a case for updating your recommendation annually rather than the donors committing upfront to donating 5 years’ worth to particular charities (if that was the idea).
Depending to some extent on whether a 5-year commitment is essential for the programmes being donated to. If it is, a middle way might be to commit upfront to donating for 5 years subject to the programmes achieving XYZ goals, to be independently assessed each year.
Another obvious point (which you mention of course): the extremely wide range of the TaRL and salt iodization cost-effectiveness figures, from far below 1 (Founders Pledge estimate) to far above, would give me concerns as a donor that these are poorly understood interventions.
There’s also the complication that by deciding to protest, individuals incur a non-negligible personal cost (in time and risk), but only make a tiny difference to the size & hence effectiveness of the demonstration. Also any benefit arising mostly accrues to others. All that on top of the risk of you spreading the virus to others.
All told, it’s far from clear it’s worth people’s while to demonstrate, even for major issues like this one. It depends on things like the size of the demonstration and your degree of altruism. I did a rough model of this a while back (excluding the virus spreading affect):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juusvkkMvuC5D7Een/rationality-of-demonstrating-and-voting
Indeed, I looked at Trump’s approval rating over time and it’s been about average for US presidents with little pandemic effect. Possibly the US is a bit of an outlier in this regard though, or it’s a bit early for an assessment.
Because the ultimate Covid death toll will be a stark, objective measure of performance relative to other countries, I suspect later in the year it will be harder for voters anywhere to maintain illusions about how well or badly their country has handled the pandemic. (That said, much is not really down to the leaders, as no-one can really be expected to have known how best to handle it, given the limited information early on and the variety of strategies that have been tried. I have little doubt though that Trump’s decision-making has been particularly poor.)
Indeed I think it will accelerate this issue, though maybe not resolve it.
In the UK, and no doubt elsewhere, universities have cancelled courses for the rest of the year, or are making them online-only, but refusing to refund students; which will make students acutely aware of what value for money they’re getting, or not.
That said I did read somewhere the observation that as degrees are as much about status & signalling as actual learning, it may make little difference. People will still prefer the prestige of an Ivy League or Oxbridge education if they can get it. That said, that prestige is rather bound up with physical attendance in grand surroundings, surrounded by top-notch professors etc.
I’ve just been through it all. A great resource—with harms too. Glad to see I had thought of almost all the long-term benefits (!), but have added a few more from it here, and thought of several further points too.
Great, thanks, I’ll check it out.
Thanks for the feedback here and on Facebook. I’ve just revised the post as a result—tightened up my arguments and added a few new points.
A significant further thought:
The above calculation is done on life expectancies, treated as expected utilities; but human psychology doesn’t work like that:
Arguably in Chris’s particular case she may lose somewhat less than half her quality of life by conforming with the lockdown. In which case her behaviour looks irrational in life expectancy terms.
But Chris’s behaviour is rational if she is risk-seeking. She prefers gambling her life (and perhaps others’) by going to the beach, to the alternative of suffering a sure loss of quality of life by staying at home. This is normal behaviour in prospect theory—the same as a ‘desperado’ who, faced with arrest and inevitable jailtime, prefers the higher risk, less certain, lower expected utility option of stealing a car, shooting at cops etc. in the hope of getting away.
I.e. Chris, a 75-year-old desperado, is risking death to avoid imprisonment (and for some people, solitary confinement).
Layard is one of the top happiness economists.
Indeed the Guardian review of the book was dreadful. I almost wrote a point-by-point refutation of it (but no-one would read it). Turns out the reviewer is a self-described Marxist with a website called ‘Leninology’ so has a political axe to grind. As is hinted at towards the end of the review—for Layard advised the Blair government (on increasing mental health funding), and Blairites are the enemy.
Quite why a national newspaper would commission & publish such a misleading, bilious, partisan piece is beyond me.
Presumably they need to keep public transport operating for key workers, e.g. medical staff, supermarket staff etc. So if it’s available then others will use it to get to parks.
Yes there’s lots of research & data on this, particularly in recent years. The best summary is the new book Can We Be Happier? by Richard Layard. The largest factors (from memory) are health (especially mental—much larger than physical health), not being unemployed, having a partner, income. The most common measures are happiness and satisfaction with life, on a 0-10 self-reported scale.
Indeed people may lack perspective; so there’s lots of work on how objective these self-reports are, what precisely they measure, whether they are absolute or relative to other people (in the same city or country) or relative to people’s own past or whatever. I think the current consensus is that they are largely absolute measures.
Not sure (without looking up) what magnitude of changes to someone’s life it would take to halve these numbers, but I have little doubt depression could do it.
Also (on a slightly technical point) most people reckon there are states worse than death, so death should be located not at 0⁄10 but maybe around 2⁄10. Which means halving your quality of life as compared with death (as an alternative) would only require a reduction from say 8⁄10 to 5⁄10 (since 5⁄10 to 2⁄10, the same distance, is a reduction to death).
Interesting and curious. I wonder if this is partly due to health only being one aspect of quality of life (happiness/life satisfaction).
Also I wonder whether the framing of the question is important. People have trouble thinking about this stuff clearly.
More understandable with $ trade-offs (people being funny about money).
Well, the specific caller in question aside, a fall from 8⁄10 to 4⁄10 (on a happiness or life satisfaction 0 to 10 scale) is plausible for a significant minority of people, e.g. if you’re elderly and live alone and have nothing much to occupy you indoors. In the UK (more so in some other countries) you’re not allowed out to relax; you need to be exercising, e.g. walking, not sitting on a bench or whatever (and police in my area are enforcing this); and the guideline is max 1 hour per day. And many with underlying health conditions in the UK are being told not to go out at all.
If this tipped you into depression, which it might with some, that could easily cause a fall from 8⁄10 to 4⁄10 or 6⁄10 to 3⁄10.
Of course the precise numbers are not really the point—I was just wanting to illustrate that the loss in quality of life can be large and of a similar scale to loss of longevity, so far from negligible.
I suspect also that if you’re elderly and may only have a few years of life left then you put a very high value on maintaining your regular activities, maybe weighting quality of life rather higher than quantity (no doubt there is research on this). Hence why when very ill they sometimes forego treatment, choose to die sooner at home rather than be kept alive in hospital, etc.
The comparison is with her not going to the beach, socializing etc. for a year (rather than one-off), which I’m arguing could well halve her quality of life, so be equivalent to losing 0.5 years of life expectancy.
I assume the concerns about people visiting open spaces—even if social distancing—are largely about the other associated risks, from people using public transport to get there, going into shops to buy sandwiches/drinks, etc.
OK, well reworking the numbers with a 2⁄10 neutral point (and Imperial’s latest figures as noted below):
Death is now a fall from 5.17 to 2 points, i.e. by 3.17 points, though presumably out of 8 not 10 as we’ve compressed our scale. So 4.5 years = 4.5 x 3.17/8 = 1.78 WALYs lost. So 1.9 to 24 million deaths = 3.4 to 43 WALYs lost.
Presumably the WALYs lost by the financial crisis is also out of 8 not 10, i.e. 0.2/8 per person = 194 million WALYs. Which is 4.5 to 57 times worse than the deaths.
I’ve just updated the figures (in footnote 7) using Imperial College’s latest global forecast of deaths. Previously a global recession like the last one came out as about 1 to 4 times as bad as pandemic deaths (in terms of impact on well-being); now it is 2.8-35 times as bad.
These are important topics IMO.
I’m not an expert, but I assume (from a glance at the second paper) this is because the 1%-59% is a cost (opportunity cost), not a value of a life year as such; i.e. in a very poor country you can extend a life by a year for as little as $3, maybe with a vaccine or micronutrient supplement. Actually that seems an order of magnitude too low to me; but nonetheless, it’s a great deal!
Thanks for this. There’s been quite a bit more research since that paper, including by Easterlin, so not sure how relevant it is now. The latest I know FWIW is from last year’s book by Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier?, which says it’s unclear but maybe economic growth often increases happiness but not always.