I think the use of both DALYs and dollars in the main article is worth talking about, in context of some of the things you have mentioned. Being a stupid human, I find that it is generally useful for me to express utility to myself in dollars, because I possess a pragmatic faculty for thinking about dollars. I might not bend over to pick up one dollar. I might spend a couple of hours working for $100. There isn’t much difference between one billion and two billion dollars, from my current perspective.
When you ask me how many dollars I would spend to avert the deaths of a million people, the answer can’t be any larger than the amount of dollars I actually have. If you ask me how many dollars I would spend to avoid the suffering associated with a root canal, it could be some noticeable percentage of my net worth.
When we start talking about decisions where thousands of DALYs hang in the balance, my monkey brain has no intuitive sense of the scope of this, and no pragmatic way of engaging with it. I don’t have the resources or power to purchase even one DALY-equivalent under my own valuation!
If the net utility of the universe is actually being largely controlled by infinitesimal probabilities of enormous utilities, then my sense of scale for both risk and value is irrelevant. It hardly matters how many utilons I attribute to a million starving people when I have only so much time and so much money.
I don’t know what, if anything, to conclude from this, except to say that it makes me feel unsuited to reasoning about anything outside the narrow human scope of likelihoods and outcomes.
I think the use of both DALYs and dollars in the main article is worth talking about, in context of some of the things you have mentioned. Being a stupid human, I find that it is generally useful for me to express utility to myself in dollars, because I possess a pragmatic faculty for thinking about dollars. I might not bend over to pick up one dollar. I might spend a couple of hours working for $100. There isn’t much difference between one billion and two billion dollars, from my current perspective.
When you ask me how many dollars I would spend to avert the deaths of a million people, the answer can’t be any larger than the amount of dollars I actually have. If you ask me how many dollars I would spend to avoid the suffering associated with a root canal, it could be some noticeable percentage of my net worth.
When we start talking about decisions where thousands of DALYs hang in the balance, my monkey brain has no intuitive sense of the scope of this, and no pragmatic way of engaging with it. I don’t have the resources or power to purchase even one DALY-equivalent under my own valuation!
If the net utility of the universe is actually being largely controlled by infinitesimal probabilities of enormous utilities, then my sense of scale for both risk and value is irrelevant. It hardly matters how many utilons I attribute to a million starving people when I have only so much time and so much money.
I don’t know what, if anything, to conclude from this, except to say that it makes me feel unsuited to reasoning about anything outside the narrow human scope of likelihoods and outcomes.