Economist specializing in cost-benefit analysis of complex public health and biorisk policies. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-people/bruns/ https://allegedwisdom.blogspot.com/
Richard Bruns
Karma: 355
Questions in order:
I never meant to make a statement that a year is better than other time units. I said year because it is the existing standard in the field. The statement was about using a life/health measurement rather than money. As the 102 post hints at, my goal is not to create ‘the best’ system ex nihilo; it is to build off of the precedent set in the field. So whenever an arbitrary choice has already become the standard, and it is not obviously worse than something else, I stick with it.
This will inevitably be handwavey, fuzzy, and based on surveys. I imagine something like the WELBY, where we set the value of an ideal life to 1, and ask people how bad it would be for various things to happen to them, and assign ‘disability weights’ to everything based on their responses.
Because it is easy for everyone to understand intuitively. See the 102 post; anything we use will need to be very approachable, so we have society-wide buy-in for the metric.
I agree with this; thank you for replying. (I thought I would get email alerts if anyone commented, but I guess I didn’t set that up right.)
In a sense, EA is already doing this. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is heavily funded by OpenPhil, and for the past month we have been going basically full-time on this:
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/index.html
However, having a private forum where people can openly communicate things that might get distorted if quoted out of context is very useful. I’ve joined the group, and am available to answer any questions there.
And if you want to participate in a prediction market, we have one running:
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/disease-prediction
There are three questions on the coronavirus.
Analytical EA types often tie themselves into knots trying to make a Grand Unified Theory to base all decisions on. This does not and will not work. All models are wrong, but some models are useful. You can, and should, use different heuristics in different situations. I am not trying to program an AI that I put in charge of the world. I am merely justifying treating all people’s time the same for the purpose of EA cause prioritization with donor money.
Clearly it would break the economy to base all government policy on the assumption that consumption has no social value, and optimize hard on that assumption. Although yes, I do believe that a world where only 10% of people are operating critical infrastructure in exchange for high social status, and the rest get a basic income and (maybe) do ‘hobby jobs’, is both possible and desirable. That flows not from the leisure time valuation, but from a rather strong intuition that most current GDP goes to things that are either positional or an addiction.