QALYs are a bad measure when it comes to adding up a small amount of time spent by a large number of individuals, because not all hours of life are equally valuable. When you take a small number of hours from a person, the hours come from a less valuable slack pool than if you take a lot of hours, so X number of hours from one person (as in an increased risk from smoking that gives an individual cancer) is not the same as X number of hours spread over many people (as in a lot of people spending time on tests).
I think this goes in the opposite direction from what you’re suggesting. For me at least, losing a small number of hours to medical testing (or similar life disruption) doesn’t come from a “slack pool”. Instead, it disrupts my life out of proportion to the amount of hours involved. For a longer-term predictable time commitment, the disruption scaled sub-linearly with the additional time spent.
As an extreme example, if I have a scheduled phone call that will only take 2 minutes, it effectively wastes 2–3 hours of my day because I can’t really do anything significant in the 2–3 hours before the phone call.
As an extreme example, if I have a scheduled phone call that will only take 2 minutes, it effectively wastes 2–3 hours of my day because I can’t really do anything significant in the 2–3 hours before the phone call.
Are you claiming this is a typical experience, or are you sharing a fact about yourself that you consider unusual?
I think I lose more time to small interruptions than most people, but the trend is typical—small time losses have a proportionally larger overhead cost than large time losses.
I don’t agree. Something that takes away my entire life when I am unlucky is going to take away a number of weddings, graduations, or even smaller things like movies that I can’t see because I’m dead. Something that takes away 1 hour of my life that is not completely random won’t do this. It won’t do this even repeated over enough people to lose the same number of hours as a single person losing his entire life. I’ll have to sacrifice something in that hour, but I’ll sacrifice a low value part of my life, not an average one. (Perhaps the opportunity cost of taking some extra sick leave from work.)
(Technically, this doesn’t mean that QALYs are wrong—QALY means quality adjusted life years. Just adding up the hours under these circumstances is a failure to adjust them for quality, and therefore calculates them wrong.)
QALYs are a bad measure when it comes to adding up a small amount of time spent by a large number of individuals, because not all hours of life are equally valuable. When you take a small number of hours from a person, the hours come from a less valuable slack pool than if you take a lot of hours, so X number of hours from one person (as in an increased risk from smoking that gives an individual cancer) is not the same as X number of hours spread over many people (as in a lot of people spending time on tests).
I think this goes in the opposite direction from what you’re suggesting. For me at least, losing a small number of hours to medical testing (or similar life disruption) doesn’t come from a “slack pool”. Instead, it disrupts my life out of proportion to the amount of hours involved. For a longer-term predictable time commitment, the disruption scaled sub-linearly with the additional time spent.
As an extreme example, if I have a scheduled phone call that will only take 2 minutes, it effectively wastes 2–3 hours of my day because I can’t really do anything significant in the 2–3 hours before the phone call.
Are you claiming this is a typical experience, or are you sharing a fact about yourself that you consider unusual?
I think I lose more time to small interruptions than most people, but the trend is typical—small time losses have a proportionally larger overhead cost than large time losses.
I don’t agree. Something that takes away my entire life when I am unlucky is going to take away a number of weddings, graduations, or even smaller things like movies that I can’t see because I’m dead. Something that takes away 1 hour of my life that is not completely random won’t do this. It won’t do this even repeated over enough people to lose the same number of hours as a single person losing his entire life. I’ll have to sacrifice something in that hour, but I’ll sacrifice a low value part of my life, not an average one. (Perhaps the opportunity cost of taking some extra sick leave from work.)
(Technically, this doesn’t mean that QALYs are wrong—QALY means quality adjusted life years. Just adding up the hours under these circumstances is a failure to adjust them for quality, and therefore calculates them wrong.)