Imagine QALYs being used in this way in food packaging, election manifestos, gym memberships, employment contracts, streaming services, etc. As in:
> “Nutritional information (per 100 g of product): 145 kcal, 16 g of sugar, 3 g of protein, […]. Estimated benefit (500 g/week for a year, healthy adults): **0.0017 QALY**.”
> “This series has 4 seasons (32 chapters) and a total running time of 48 h. Longitudinal analyses of surveys conducted about similar shows predict a value of **2.8 μQ** per season.”
> “The study conducted by our think-tank estimates the likely impact of the policies proposed by all parties contesting the current election (in **QALY per capita**) in the following way: […]”
> “Our research suggests that the last tax reform resulted in a net loss of ca. **369 MQ (10⁶ QALY)** for the country.”
Ultimately, _everything_ you do, don't do, consume, use, avoid or covet should work towards that goal of maximising your #wellbeing or the well-being of others, right? What better unit than “QALY” for that?
“Currency” carries too much psychological and ideological baggage, and it keeps the spotlight in one very specific dimension (ie, money).
“Time” is better, but it ignores the vital distinction between time spent and time well spent (remember: it's “live long and prosper” not just “live long”).
I know it sounds far-fetched right now, but a much more refined definition of #QALY could be used to estimate the expected value of all products, habits and public policies — and to measure their impact in hindsight.
Since our goal in #life is maximising _{well-being, quality of life, happiness, flourishing, utility}_ both for us and in the universe as a whole (nobody sits at either extreme of that spectrum; ie nobody's absolutely selfish or absolutely altruistic), I would like everybody to know about [QALY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year)'s and use them more often than they use dollars, hours or calories.
We all have internalised (imperfect) convertibility between time and money already: we routinely give away the former for the latter (work), or vice versa (outsourcing, entertainment, services). Less clear is the relationship between those two dimensions and others such as physical health, physical safety, mental health, power, fulfilment, transcendence, etc… and yet we know there is one — because if pressed we know how many € or weeks we'd trade in exchange for more of those (or vice versa).
Perhaps a robust and granular version of [QALY](http://www.bandolier.org.uk/painres/download/whatis/QALY.pdf) is the most comprehensive and least biased unit with which to assess individual an collective decision-making.
Digital life #tip:
I open #Twitter regularly, just to check mentions and DMs (yes, I could enable web/mail notifs instead, but I don't like them; that's another story). Too often I get distracted by the “trends” sidebar (#clickbait, news, gossip, photos) and I end up clicking and skimming some shitty article.
In config, I set my location to “จ.เชียงราย, ประเทศไทย” (that's somewhere in Thailand) and unchecked personalisation (“trends for you”). And now the list of what's trending looks much better for me.
[I love Bryan Caplan](https://flickr.com/photos/tripu/48054382953/), but I think he's is naïve if he thinks #morality can be solved by “divide and conquer”. The “simple cases” he provides as examples of “microethics” are anything but.
> _“Start with simple cases where right and wrong are obvious. Is it wrong to punish an escaped murderer by torturing his infant child? Is it wrong to welsh on a $20 bet? Is it wrong to steal an alcoholic’s liquor? To refuse to give all your surplus income away to needy strangers? Then build from there.”_
If only these were “obvious”!
Dilemmas in #ethics don't necessarily become easier when the cardinality of the set of individuals involved shrinks!
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/04/introduction_to.html
Whatever happened to urban tribes?
I remember reading and hearing about the different tribes, music and trends in the 90's and 00's. But apparently nothing now.
Have we become more homogeneous as a society?
Is it not politically correct to spot patterns and sort into categories now?
Have we become so diverse and tolerant that we no longer even notice that people fall into different “tribes”?
Has politics superseded music and hobbies as the most conspicuous markers of tribe affiliation?
What does it say of us as a civilisation that the most reliable hint that something might be spam, phishing, fake, is still that it has lots of spe...
Hey, Eric :)
Not to reignite the discussion, but it seems @slatestarcodex [just posted about this](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme). I like him a lot and usually trust his analyses, so I've saved that post for later. I think it may shed some light.
And while at it, I also saw now a couple interesting responses at the time to that original tweet, each defending opposite views: [Paul Graham](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1519885054960357377)'s and [Kevin Kruse](https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1519743132132380672)'s. I'll come back to that when I have free time, too.
OK, I'm done for the ~~day~~ decade
That looks delicious! (I'd swap beef for textured soy or something like that, though 🥦)
#Microsoft, #Skype: this is very stupid.
What comes before the `@` in my email address is… a single character. You're banning a letter of the alphabet for me.
You're preventing me from using a very robust, completely new password — so now I have to make some contortions (and most importantly, _remember_ those contortions) to adapt my usual password strategy to this silly requirement.
tripu
boosted
🇳🇱
I don't deny the valuable input provided by ethics as perhaps the only exception to my initial claim. And even so, as I said before, good modern moral philosophy tries very hard to be rational, evidence-based, objective, parsimonious, coherent and accurate (there's a lot of math there, in the form of estimates, stats, probability, logic, etc). Those traits may not suffice to qualify as “science”, but it surely gets much closer to “scientific” than “all the other stuff” (pre-modern philosophy, religion, hunches, tradition, etc).
In this article, there are nine mentions of “survival/dying odds/chance”, and a few references to “potential years of life” and to the age of the patients. All those are nothing but numbers: either well-known figures, estimates, probabilities, or approximations taken from actuarial tables.
Also, I want to highlight that the article mentions three different moral theories (utilitarianism, contractarianism, and deontology) and three people to represent or defend each… and the conclusion is that for all of them, it makes sense to give priority to those who are more likely to benefit from treatment over those with worse odds.
It's almost as if ethicists mostly agreed and had very little to contribute, once that consensus is reached.
Where is room for progress? In the numbers. Get more accurate analysis and thus better diagnoses, more precise survival chances, better estimations of the effects of different treatments… and the priority queue gets closer and closer to perfect.
Ah, yes. That too. I forgot to object to that sentence.
Expanding on what @ImperfectIdea said: as long as one can
* refine the model,
* consider more variables,
* measure more parameters,
* measure the same parameters but more accurately,
* run more simulations,
* find more instances of the same phenomenon in the past,
* or even survey more experts in the field,
definitely additional measurements would help.
Very interesting questions. Indeed those interest me especially (because I'm a rationalist, an utilitarian, and an effective altruist).
First of all, and most importantly: even if I were paralysed by those quandaries and were unable to offer a single helpful comment, that would _not_ prove that #SPAOSKPE (“science plus applications of scientific knowledge plus engineering”) don't suffice to solve them — it's much more likely that I personally lack the knowledge, training, intelligence or time to make any progress.
Still, some ideas about how a purely “scientific” mind could proceed:
The concept of risk can be studied and modelled mathematically. Mathematicians working for insurance companies and quants working in Wall St do that routinely.
Even if the expected value is constant in your scenarios, the risk is clearly not. It makes total sense that one always chooses the path that minimises risk, ceteris paribus. I think that criterion alone would “solve” these scenarios.
Now, I agree with you that “it is definitely difficult to give a quantitative answer”. Your scenarios are easy because the expected value is constant. It becomes more tricky if you say that 300 people boarding the life boat risks a 50% chance of everyone dying. Then the expected value changes, and we can't look at risk alone to break the tie.
I don't know how this gets modelled formally. But I do know that there are ways, and I very much doubt that risk departments in banks, nuclear safety agencies, public transport regulators and those tasked with allocating limited resources for public health rely mostly on their gut, scripture or prescient dreams.
