Moore’s Law means that the cost of computation is falling exponentially. Even if one thought that providing computing power was the best way to spend money (on electricity) 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.
Biomedical research already gets an outsized portion of all R&D, with diminishing returns. The NIH budget is over $30 billion.
Slightly accelerating protein folding research doesn’t benefit very much from astronomical waste considerations compared to improving the security of future progress with existential risk reduction.
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 practice, it is worth doing the computation now—we can easily establish this by looking at the past, and noting that the people who performed large computations then, would not have been better off waiting until now.
$30 billion is a lot of money compared to what you and I have in our pockets. It’s dirt cheap compared to the trillions being spent on unsuccessful attempts to treat people who are dying for lack of better biotechnology.
By far the most important way to reduce real life existential risks is speed.
Even if you could find a more cost effective research area to finance, it is highly unlikely that you are actually spending every penny you can spare in that way. The value of spending resources on X, needs to be compared to the other ways you are actually spending those resources, not to the other ways you hypothetically could be spending them.
Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed
Moore’s Law means that the cost of computation is falling exponentially. Even if one thought that providing computing power was the best way to spend money (on electricity) 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.
Biomedical research already gets an outsized portion of all R&D, with diminishing returns. The NIH budget is over $30 billion.
Slightly accelerating protein folding research doesn’t benefit very much from astronomical waste considerations compared to improving the security of future progress with existential risk reduction.
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.
In practice, it is worth doing the computation now—we can easily establish this by looking at the past, and noting that the people who performed large computations then, would not have been better off waiting until now.
$30 billion is a lot of money compared to what you and I have in our pockets. It’s dirt cheap compared to the trillions being spent on unsuccessful attempts to treat people who are dying for lack of better biotechnology.
By far the most important way to reduce real life existential risks is speed.
Even if you could find a more cost effective research area to finance, it is highly unlikely that you are actually spending every penny you can spare in that way. The value of spending resources on X, needs to be compared to the other ways you are actually spending those resources, not to the other ways you hypothetically could be spending them.
Whether it makes sense in general doing a calculation now or just waiting isn’t always so clear cut. Also, at least historically there hasn’t always been a choice. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, mathematicians studying the Riemann zeta function really wanted to do hard computations to look at more of the non-trivial zeros. but this was given very low priority by the people who controlled computers and by the people who programmed them. The priority was so low that by the time it advanced up the queue the computer in question would already be labeled as obsolete and thus would not be maintained. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first such calculation was actually performed