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For one, minimizing disability-adjusted life years lost. Of course it's not perfect and making this the the only criterium would be morally wrong, but it's defi

For one, minimizing disability-adjusted life years lost. Of course it's not perfect and making this the the only criterium would be morally wrong, but it's definitely more fair than going by bank accounts. Quote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year): >The methodology is not an economic measure. It measures how much healthy life is lost. It does not assign a monetary value to any person or condition, and it does not measure how much productive work or money is lost as a result of death and disease. However, HALYs, including DALYs and QALYs, are especially useful in guiding the allocation of health resources as they provide a common numerator, allowing for the expression of utility in terms of dollar/DALY, or dollar/QALY. This is already widely in use btw, it's not exactly a new idea.

roenxi 6y ago
I see a decent argument that, but that is basically inverting someone's access to healthcare with the amount of time they've put into their community. It is much easier for old people to look back on a lifetime of doing good than young people, but prioritising healthcare to young people minimises DALY lost. It also penalises people who are sick with serious diseases, as giving them more healthcare would have less impact than helping someone healthy. I think it is easy to justify mathematically but in practice would be quite cruel. Plus it creates incentives for shenanigans as people desperately bribe doctors to lie about their potential futures.
- jmiserez 6y ago
  I don't think lying has much of an effect, the main thing that counts for "potential future" is being alive / able to "live". IIRC the metric is routinely used when evaluating new treatments, measuring their associated cost in $/DALY helps comparing and price negotiations. If things are really tight (think war, poverty, pandemic, etc) I think at least it can be fair and effective. One can't live forever, and IMHO prioritizing younger people for medical care is widely accepted. Of course there needs to be a few humans in the loop as it's just a statistic and there are no guarantees. And obviously a cold soulless robot AI optimizing for it would be insane, but that goes for most metrics.

roenxi 6y ago

I see a decent argument that, but that is basically inverting someone's access to healthcare with the amount of time they've put into their community. It is much easier for old people to look back on a lifetime of doing good than young people, but prioritising healthcare to young people minimises DALY lost. It also penalises people who are sick with serious diseases, as giving them more healthcare would have less impact than helping someone healthy. I think it is easy to justify mathematically but in practice would be quite cruel. Plus it creates incentives for shenanigans as people desperately bribe doctors to lie about their potential futures.

jmiserez 6y ago
I don't think lying has much of an effect, the main thing that counts for "potential future" is being alive / able to "live". IIRC the metric is routinely used when evaluating new treatments, measuring their associated cost in $/DALY helps comparing and price negotiations. If things are really tight (think war, poverty, pandemic, etc) I think at least it can be fair and effective. One can't live forever, and IMHO prioritizing younger people for medical care is widely accepted. Of course there needs to be a few humans in the loop as it's just a statistic and there are no guarantees. And obviously a cold soulless robot AI optimizing for it would be insane, but that goes for most metrics.