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Sewing-Machine comments on Case study: Folding@home - Less Wrong
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Comments (40)
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.
By the way is this number available in QALYs?
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/
I didn't see QALYs mentioned. My general understanding is that air pollution disproportionately hurts the old, so the QALY loss is not so bad as it could be, but then, the comparison is to interventions in Africa focused on kids, who have many more potential QALYs than old Westerners... so I suspect on net it strengthens the case against Folding@home.
I think there there are many forgone QALY's for the young due to air pollution that are just too hard to measure! My dream girl lives in Bangkok and doesn't want to leave it...but I don't want to live there because of the pollution and culture of scamming foreigners!