Case study: Folding@home

I have questioned before the wisdom of spending money to "save lives" in countries that do not have a functioning economy. If I save someone's life, I'd prefer to think that their life will not need to be saved by my charity dollars again next year, and the year after that. It is not at all clear to me that GiveWell or other charities presents data that accounts for this. I'd be interested if you have done any analysis on the topic.

Instead of looking at a rough figure of the cost to "save a life" for an unspecified period of time, I'd prefer to see alternatives considered on the basis of the net present value of the external charity funds that will likely be required to continue saving an average's person's life for the next 70 years or so (without considering the related issue of cost-burden for geriatric medicine).

For example if we know a particular region has cycles of drought, war, famine and starvation every fifteen years or so, then instead of considering only the cost X - where X is the funds required to see a person through the present crisis - we should consider the cost of saving their life to be 70/15X. This method would favor spending in regions that are less likely to be in the same circumstances again and again.

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.

Each terawatt-hour of coal kills 15 people

By the way is this number available in QALYs?

I found the part about the American Revolutionary War in "My Mistakes" very interesting - it was a perspective I hadn't considered before.

Perhaps you should try and compare costs and benefits more directly?

In particular: how much research can get done by other means for $12 million a year? By paying researchers and technicians, maintaining lab space, etc. For example, MIT spends on the order of $1.2 billion a year on research. How does the contribution of folding@home compare to 1% of the research done at MIT each year? Of course, we'd be buying marginal research, not average research: we can get a good lower bound on the marginal benefit of more money by looking at the value of more equipment or somewhat skilled labor for labs (money that hires additional researchers may just be poaching from other efforts, so it's a little harder to get conservative estimates).

This analysis may be slightly less straightforward, but it gives a much stronger argument against spending power on folding@home. Regardless of how the individual feels about the tradeoff between fundamental progress and lives in the developing world today, they would probably be better served by giving to a charity that does fundamental research.

There is also potentially a large benefit from understanding how efforts like folding@home could be better run. The most conservative estimate for its value would be the marginal benefit of the most effective similar distributed computing project (if the main bottleneck in improving effectiveness was experience with similar distributed computing projects, which may be unlikely).

I endorse the theory of the My Mistakes audit, but find your practice is unusual. One of my most valuable documents is a text file in which I have a few items -- title of the file is "things I used to believe were true which I have since found out to be false". One time I was at a seminar and told the seminar leader about my file and he admonished me:

"Don't ever do that!"

I changed the subject but I gathered afterward his problem was that such a file is harmful to our precarious sense of self-esteem.

Anyway, the thing which you have done which I almost never do is share this information. To me it is a pretty private thing (they are largely private things).

Perhaps your "mistakes" file is only a partial listing?

The Revolutionary War angle is interesting, but I think it's hard to figure out the implications of that huge a counterfactual.

Would the Civil War have been prevented because slavery would have been peacefully abolished? Or would there have been a war against that abolition? Perhaps not extremely likely-- maybe the slaveholders would have been less willing to revolt against a bigger government, but it's hard to be sure. Could a larger block of slaveholders have done more to prevent British abolition?

I've heard that the British were more careful with their other colonies because they didn't want more of them breaking away.

WWI becomes really hard to predict. Would Germany have been more careful if Britain had been that much larger?

I admit I'm not sure if I'm arguing honestly on this. I may be assuming too much of a pull towards history as it happened.

Does my computer really use less energy when it's running System Idle Process instead of Folding@home?

Your inline divisions (?) show up like this in Chrome for me:

So what’s the right way then? Look at a very similar grid computing project, Rosetta@home. Rosetta@home has only 1175th the computing power of Folding@home and presumably consumes proportionately less electricity; hence it directly kills 1.01175 people a year and indirectly kills 12650175=72

Luddism might be justified; at the same time, though, there seem to be potentially transient facts (like low productivity in the developing world) which may explain the problem. I'd also like to lean on them as an example: their lot is the result of being outside the factory system, which takes non-factory humans and produces factory workers with high productivity (cf. Hanson on same). It seems plausible that programming, etc. has that same feature now, so it's not as if we've never done this before. We've done it at least twice (agriculture, factories).

I take it that you partially changed "my mistakes" to include nicotine. I enjoyed your article on it - but how are you using it?

Are you rotating with other stimulants on a regular basis, using when you like, using to promote habit formation etc.

On the other hand, what good are those 12,000 people (poor Africans to boot) to you or me? Would you even notice if they lived or not?