it would likely be better to save the money spent on the electric power and buy more computing power later, unless the computation is much much more useful now.
In principle, this is true; in practice, saying things like these seems more likely to make the people in question to simply cease donating electricity, instead of ceasing to donate electricity and donating the saved money to something more useful. Installing a program and running it all the time doesn’t really feel like you’re spending money, but explicitly donating money requires you to cross the mental barrier between free and paid in a way that running the program doesn’t.
For those reasons, I’d be very hesitant about arguing against running programs like Folding@Home; it seems likely to cause more harm than good.
Furthermore, it seems to me like things like F@H are rather unlikely to cause a “good deed of the day” effect for very long: by their nature, they’re continuing processes that rather quickly fade into the background of your consciousness and you partially forget about. If F@H automatically starts up whenever you boot your computer, then having it running wouldn’t count for a day’s good deed for most people. Constantly seeing the icon might boost a cached self effect of “I should do useful things”, though.
In principle, this is true; in practice, saying things like these seems more likely to make the people in question to simply cease donating electricity, instead of ceasing to donate electricity and donating the saved money to something more useful. Installing a program and running it all the time doesn’t really feel like you’re spending money, but explicitly donating money requires you to cross the mental barrier between free and paid in a way that running the program doesn’t.
For those reasons, I’d be very hesitant about arguing against running programs like Folding@Home; it seems likely to cause more harm than good.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_deed_for_the_day/
But on the other hand http://lesswrong.com/lw/4e/cached_selves/ ; it doesn’t seem clear to me which effect dominates, so we should be careful about drawing inferences based on that.
Furthermore, it seems to me like things like F@H are rather unlikely to cause a “good deed of the day” effect for very long: by their nature, they’re continuing processes that rather quickly fade into the background of your consciousness and you partially forget about. If F@H automatically starts up whenever you boot your computer, then having it running wouldn’t count for a day’s good deed for most people. Constantly seeing the icon might boost a cached self effect of “I should do useful things”, though.