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Sure, so give me a number. Eventually somebody[1] has to make a high-level decision on which strategy to pursue. And they have to give directives that can be fo

Sure, so give me a number. Eventually somebody[1] has to make a high-level decision on which strategy to pursue. And they have to give directives that can be followed by people who don't know your entire thought processes. That's what it means to be a bureaucracy. So which is it, will you choose an imperfect quantitative model where some numbers are pulled out of your ass? Or will you just let every low-level functionary pull entire decisions out of their individual asses and hope something resembling a coherent strategy will emerge?[2] [1] Well, ideally. The US response to covid was pretty much [2]. If it wasn't clear, [2] was a rhetorical question and you should not do that.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> Sure, so give me a number 42? I'm genuinely not sure what number you're asking for. > Eventually somebody[1] has to make a high-level decision on which strategy to pursue. Yes, of course, but that decision making doesn't require a quantitative model assigning value to life (or not). You can make a lot of very well-informed decisions without ever thinking about that particular aspect of optimization theory with any particularly high level of detail. "Aggressively avoid protracted exponential growth" doesn't require knowing anything about the value of life relative to other things. Mathematical modeling can be useful for responding to covid-19. However, mathematical modeling for this question is not useful, because your answer gets plugged into yet another model where there's too much uncertainty for your answer to the have any quantitatively justifiable impact on decision making. To give a toy example, spending a bunch of time figuring out the value of $c$ in $f(x) = x^n + c$ is a waste of time if you don't know much about the value of $n$.
- solveit 6y ago
  Hanson explicitly disagrees, to quote: >Yet it is easy to show that we can both have more money and save more lives if we are more consistent about the price we pay for lives in the many different death-risk-versus-cost choices that we make. He's not even saying you need an accurate value, he's saying you need a consistent value.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    >> Yet it is easy to show that we can both have more money and save more lives if we are more consistent about the price we pay for lives in the many different death-risk-versus-cost choices that we make. TBH I'm not even quite sure what is meant by that assertion, but the article certainly doesn't contain a compelling justification and the claim is almost prime facie false. There are such completely trivial counter-examples for the plain meaning that I'm not even sure what the author's intended meaning was. E.g., "lives are worth negative infinity" is consistent, and you'll always end up with more money and save fewer lives. Ditto for "1 life = GDP of the world".
    - GavinMcG 6y ago
      If the counterexamples are so trivial and obvious, the author must be a complete idiot, right? But of course they're not a complete idiot, so maybe there's another explanation, that you could have arrived at with a dash of charitable thinking.
      - throwawaygh 6y ago
        > If the counterexamples are so trivial and obvious, the author must be a complete idiot, right? No. Smart people make simple mistakes all the time. Being wrong doesn't make one an idiot. Fortunately for me :) Also, the realization that "lives vs. other-resource" is unnecessary to model because it's either dominated by other uncertainty or else results in deontology is not at all an obvious conclusion. It took me a decade to arrive there. What I was pointing out in the above comment is how choosing extreme values for one resource or the other effectively gives you a deontological ethics that strictly prioritizes one thing over the other. You can solve the optimization problem if you want, but the solution is obvious. deontological ethics is the subset of utilitarian ethics where you don't have to do some calculations because you just max out the value of certain objectives. > But of course they're not a complete idiot, so maybe there's another explanation, that you could have arrived at with a dash of charitable thinking. Maybe. Can you explain why I'm confused, then? The plain meaning of the author's quote, even taken in context, seems like it has some trivial counter-examples. What am I misunderstanding? BTW, I'm not being coy. I am being charitable. When I say "I'm not even quite sure what is meant by that assertion", I mean it. The thing I think the author means has trivial counter-examples, so the author must mean something aside from what I assume. Or else hasn't thought about the extreme values. Which would also be possible.
- barrkel 6y ago
  In order to make trade-offs - balancing benefits vs opportunity costs - in a health system, you need a common unit. You can't do a case by case analysis everywhere, and you can't consider categories of cases separately or you'll get deviance in evaluation and global inconsistency, which directly implies less efficiency and worse outcomes for some categories. Do you disagree with this? How do you deal with the existence proof of systems which do use quantitative models? (In the absence of models, there's still people who allocate resources, and resources are quantified. There is still a quantitative judgement made in the form of allocation. I'm finding it hard to understand your position in any rational sense.)
  - totony 6y ago
    Agreed, I think people get too caught off on deontology when assigning monetary value to life. It's just a common unit, if you can save one life by investing 20$ more in healthcare, then losing one life to make 20$ is rationally neutral (considering the lives are equal based on some metric, e.g. expected years left to live).
deleted 6y ago
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throwawaygh 6y ago

> Sure, so give me a number 42? I'm genuinely not sure what number you're asking for. > Eventually somebody[1] has to make a high-level decision on which strategy to pursue. Yes, of course, but that decision making doesn't require a quantitative model assigning value to life (or not). You can make a lot of very well-informed decisions without ever thinking about that particular aspect of optimization theory with any particularly high level of detail. "Aggressively avoid protracted exponential growth" doesn't require knowing anything about the value of life relative to other things. Mathematical modeling can be useful for responding to covid-19. However, mathematical modeling for this question is not useful, because your answer gets plugged into yet another model where there's too much uncertainty for your answer to the have any quantitatively justifiable impact on decision making. To give a toy example, spending a bunch of time figuring out the value of $c$ in $f(x) = x^n + c$ is a waste of time if you don't know much about the value of $n$.

solveit 6y ago
Hanson explicitly disagrees, to quote: >Yet it is easy to show that we can both have more money and save more lives if we are more consistent about the price we pay for lives in the many different death-risk-versus-cost choices that we make. He's not even saying you need an accurate value, he's saying you need a consistent value.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  >> Yet it is easy to show that we can both have more money and save more lives if we are more consistent about the price we pay for lives in the many different death-risk-versus-cost choices that we make. TBH I'm not even quite sure what is meant by that assertion, but the article certainly doesn't contain a compelling justification and the claim is almost prime facie false. There are such completely trivial counter-examples for the plain meaning that I'm not even sure what the author's intended meaning was. E.g., "lives are worth negative infinity" is consistent, and you'll always end up with more money and save fewer lives. Ditto for "1 life = GDP of the world".
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    If the counterexamples are so trivial and obvious, the author must be a complete idiot, right? But of course they're not a complete idiot, so maybe there's another explanation, that you could have arrived at with a dash of charitable thinking.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      > If the counterexamples are so trivial and obvious, the author must be a complete idiot, right? No. Smart people make simple mistakes all the time. Being wrong doesn't make one an idiot. Fortunately for me :) Also, the realization that "lives vs. other-resource" is unnecessary to model because it's either dominated by other uncertainty or else results in deontology is not at all an obvious conclusion. It took me a decade to arrive there. What I was pointing out in the above comment is how choosing extreme values for one resource or the other effectively gives you a deontological ethics that strictly prioritizes one thing over the other. You can solve the optimization problem if you want, but the solution is obvious. deontological ethics is the subset of utilitarian ethics where you don't have to do some calculations because you just max out the value of certain objectives. > But of course they're not a complete idiot, so maybe there's another explanation, that you could have arrived at with a dash of charitable thinking. Maybe. Can you explain why I'm confused, then? The plain meaning of the author's quote, even taken in context, seems like it has some trivial counter-examples. What am I misunderstanding? BTW, I'm not being coy. I am being charitable. When I say "I'm not even quite sure what is meant by that assertion", I mean it. The thing I think the author means has trivial counter-examples, so the author must mean something aside from what I assume. Or else hasn't thought about the extreme values. Which would also be possible.
barrkel 6y ago
In order to make trade-offs - balancing benefits vs opportunity costs - in a health system, you need a common unit. You can't do a case by case analysis everywhere, and you can't consider categories of cases separately or you'll get deviance in evaluation and global inconsistency, which directly implies less efficiency and worse outcomes for some categories. Do you disagree with this? How do you deal with the existence proof of systems which do use quantitative models? (In the absence of models, there's still people who allocate resources, and resources are quantified. There is still a quantitative judgement made in the form of allocation. I'm finding it hard to understand your position in any rational sense.)
- totony 6y ago
  Agreed, I think people get too caught off on deontology when assigning monetary value to life. It's just a common unit, if you can save one life by investing 20$ more in healthcare, then losing one life to make 20$ is rationally neutral (considering the lives are equal based on some metric, e.g. expected years left to live).

deleted 6y ago

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