In your cost analysis, you're comparing how much electricity is used by folding@home to the number zero. But your thesis is that participants in folding-at-home are doing so to pursue status. Isn't it important to consider how much electricity is used by alternative forms of status-seeking? This is hard to quantify, but the counterfactual world where there is no status-seeking, or even where there is less status-seeking, is sort of hard to imagine.
Each terawatt-hour of coal kills 15 people
By the way is this number available in QALYs?
Isn't it important to consider how much electricity is used by alternative forms of status-seeking? This is hard to quantify, but the counterfactual world where there is no status-seeking, or even where there is less status-seeking, is sort of hard to imagine.
I see it more as a fake-altruism-signaling game - eliminate the harmful signal (Folding@home), and the activities aren't 100% displaced into other activities, more or less harmful (I don't think the demand is inelastic); to put it another way, https://www.xkcd.com/871/
...By the way is this number av
Latest in an irregular series, some of whose previous entries were Edge.org and the Girl Scouts...
I examine the Folding@home distributed computing project with reference to the costs (electricity resulting in air pollution causing deaths) and benefits (some papers): http://www.gwern.net/Charity is not about helping. Additional data on either side of the cost-benefit is welcome.
(I also recently split out my essay describing things I have changed my mind on.)