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Lumifer comments on One Year of Goodsearching - Less Wrong
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Why not? Genuine question, because my job is pretty much nothing but cost-benefit analysis of fixed-cost projects which pay off a small amount every year, and the calculation you describe as 'not how you do cost-benefit analysis' is almost exactly how I would do a cost-benefit analysis of this kind (although I wouldn't phrase it as $1200 / hour because that's clunky, I'd probably talk about a percentage return on investment). I rate the probability that I am wrong here as extremely small, but if I am wrong I really need to hear it, and have the problem explained to me.
If I were totally comitted to getting the most accurate answer I'd add a couple of complications that katydee doesn't - for example;
I would discount against the possibility that GoodSearch no longer exists in 2040 (and discount future earnings more generally),
I would try to estimate a probability that I'd need to reconfigure my settings in the future, and estimate timings for that (if both Chrome and GoodSearch are still around in 30 years I'd be surprised!)
But ignoring these complications for the moment I think it is totally accurate to say in 2040, "I have donated $16,000 to charity since 2014". I think the $1200/hour rhetoric is unhelpful, because it implies that you could earn another $1200 by working another hour, when in fact you don't actually ever earn $1200 (well, I suppose you do after about a decade) and you can only earn the money over a very long period of time. I would probably describe it as a 'Nominal Rate of Return of X% per annum over Y years', compared to a nominal rate of return of almost zero percent per annum if I don't search with GoodSearch (it is possible my advertising generates a multiplier effect which has a tiny positive externality on me, but I'd expect this to be almost totally negligable)
Where is the error in my reasoning?
Well, if we were to approach this seriously, there a few more factors in play.
On the benefits side you need to estimate the expected length of time that this scheme will be operational. It's not just GoodSearch being around, it also them continuing to offer the same rate (and the price of generic eyeballs has been going down since as far back as I can remember and shows no signs of stopping) while providing adequate service.
You also need to figure out the appropriate discount rate since $1 in 2040 is quite different from $1 in 2014.
On the costs side you need to estimate how many additional reconfigurations you might need (browsers change, config files become corrupted, etc. etc.). Also, every time you find find a particular Bing search inadequate and need to re-search using Google, that's more time cost which could easily swamp the initial 10-minute estimate. If you believe the Bing search to be inferior to Google you should also include the opportunity costs of missing something important without realizing it.
More importantly, you need to realize what the main cost is -- it's not reconfiguration time, it's you allowing yourself to be tracked by Bing, etc. (that's what the advertisers are actually paying for). That cost is hard to estimate and probably depends on the individual, but it exists and ignoring it is unwise.
P.S. By the way, it turns out Goodsearch doesn't donate 1c/search. It donates 50% of its revenue -- that's quite a different thing.
I agree with everything you've said, but I would point out that I already allow myself to be tracked by Google, so the true cost is only the difference between the 'badness' of Google and Microsoft.