Yeah, the last paragraph is very close to how I’ve been thinking about these things. Maybe instead of “attention” I’d focus on “importance”. People propagate information based on what they consider important, but their importance judgments are themselves based on information received from other people. So the public conversation becomes a huge game of “importance telephone”, leading to factions that hate each other for having “wrong” importance judgments.
Maybe effective altruism could be a way out of this mess? Agree on the QALY as a common yardstick of importance, and create QALY-centric news media. Has anyone tried that?
“Importance” is another good way of thinking about it. Effective altruism is one potential route out of this mess. Like any single metric, QALY is bound to run into problems if it’s taken too far to the extreme; there are things QALY is a bad metric for. But that’s not an issue right now, on the margin, for the world we live in.
Another thing I like about QALY-based news is it would automatically select for people making the world a better place in on a large scale. I would love for that sort of thing to get my attention. I feel it properly combines staring straight into the awfulness of the world with working hard and creatively to make things better.
Yeah, the last paragraph is very close to how I’ve been thinking about these things. Maybe instead of “attention” I’d focus on “importance”. People propagate information based on what they consider important, but their importance judgments are themselves based on information received from other people. So the public conversation becomes a huge game of “importance telephone”, leading to factions that hate each other for having “wrong” importance judgments.
Maybe effective altruism could be a way out of this mess? Agree on the QALY as a common yardstick of importance, and create QALY-centric news media. Has anyone tried that?
“Importance” is another good way of thinking about it. Effective altruism is one potential route out of this mess. Like any single metric, QALY is bound to run into problems if it’s taken too far to the extreme; there are things QALY is a bad metric for. But that’s not an issue right now, on the margin, for the world we live in.
Another thing I like about QALY-based news is it would automatically select for people making the world a better place in on a large scale. I would love for that sort of thing to get my attention. I feel it properly combines staring straight into the awfulness of the world with working hard and creatively to make things better.