Good to hear what you’re up to, seems like a very promising project to me! A few questions about WELLBY though
1) How do you envision WELLBY interacting with the SWB community? Is the long term plan that this will remain a metric developed by you or is the long term plan for this to be a more independent measurement that for SWB researchers use and improve upon without any involvement from you
2) Do you see it being a long term “competitor” to other metrics such as QALYs and DALYs as they are used in global health today, or do you imagine it being something that only organizations in EA or perhaps mental health use in the foreseeable future?
3) how does “Well-being-adjusted life years” get shortened into “WELLBY” rather than “WALY”, “WBALY” or at least “WELLBALY”??? :( Did you consider the negative effects on the reader’s WELLBY caused by the confusion about how that abbreviation works? :’(
I think this is a pretty common challenge in charity in general. In 2019 I had a panel discussion with some very senior people within global health, and one of the topics was making long term and potentially speculative investments in health, such as pandemic preparedness. One of them responded that investments were really important but that we have to “Invest in the things that are killing them today, not just what might kill them some day”. I interpret that as saying it was very important to make these longer term investments, but that it also is very hard to justify both to yourself and to the affected people that you have to ignore their suffering in order to alleviate some potential suffering in the future.
So I think this challenge is something that most people in charity struggle with to varying degrees. Going for the direct help is often the more appealing solution, and it is the correct move in many situations. But as covid-19 unfortunately showed us, it’s often better to take the less motivating long term perspective.