Clarity comments on Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Elo 08 February 2016 04:47AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (215)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Clarity 10 February 2016 01:56:45AM *  0 points [-]

I agree. QALY also relate to happiness, whereas DALY's relate to functioning.

If you are a billionaire, you have a selfish incentive to reduce DALY's to raise productivity.

QALY's are altruistic in the truest sense. I feel that should be pivotal in EA, not DALY's.

Just because someone can function perfectly (no 'disability') doesn't mean there no super depressed and miserable. They, even if they are a millionaire banker, could be a lot worse off than a highly 'disabled' quadraplegic from the Ivory Coast.

Comment author: bogus 10 February 2016 08:29:58PM 0 points [-]

Doesn't severe depression have a DALY weight? Of course one could also be miserable for all sorts of reasons without actually being depressed in a medical sense, and DALYs wouldn't account for this. But that's just one of the many ways in which DALYs optimize for practicality, compared to QALYs.