isn’t “saving a child’s life” but “saving one day of a child’s life”.
I try in general to replace the “lives saved” metric with the “QALYs gained” metric for precisely this reason; maximizing lives saved has some very strange properties. (My go-to example is that it leads me to prefer to avoid curing a condition that causes periodic life-threatening seizures, preferring to treat each seizure as it occurs.)
You can get around that particular example by disvaluing lives lost, rather than valuing lives saved. Of course I agree that actually QALYs or something similar are a far better metric.
I try in general to replace the “lives saved” metric with the “QALYs gained” metric for precisely this reason; maximizing lives saved has some very strange properties. (My go-to example is that it leads me to prefer to avoid curing a condition that causes periodic life-threatening seizures, preferring to treat each seizure as it occurs.)
You can get around that particular example by disvaluing lives lost, rather than valuing lives saved. Of course I agree that actually QALYs or something similar are a far better metric.