I read it as claims the article was making. I too was confused, but perhaps that is just the communication?
I think the article was going for a comparison between extrinsic motivation (which they seem to claim the original quadratic funding requires) and intrinsic motivation. It seems they just chose a poor example. The article attempts to quantize the expected reward for the extrinsic motivation ("They each expect to experience €6,000,000 worth of individual utility") while it fails to quantize the expected reward for the intrinsic motivation ("But in the selfish scenario, total utility is 3 times higher, because the utility is experienced independently by each contributor, whereas utility of saved lives is experienced only once by each of the cancer patients).
I believe, it has to do with their narrow conception of "experience". I don't know how any rational person could expect to "experience" €6,000,000 worth of art as my first criticism. Now, it would be fair to say that the implication that the wealthy benefactors expect that experience could be seen as a criticism of quadratic funding. But to roll with that ludicrous expectation for the sake of argument and then to fail to give a similar expectation of reward from the experience of saving 60 lives is not a fair argument.
If I can "imagine" the benefactor expecting €6,000,000 worth of experience for knowing the art is on display at the local museum, I could "imagine" the benefactor expecting some non-zero-euro amount of experience for knowing 60 people survived cancer.
If we quantify the "experience" in euros for the first scenario, it seems unfair not to quantify the "experience" for the second scenario. In this case it is about being consistent in argument, which the article fails to do.
the article claims that a contributor to art benefits from enjoying the art and a contributor to cancer research doesn't (except for feeling good), and therefore quadratic funding would favor art contributions and disfavor cancer research contributions. GP claims (and i agree) that contributors to cancer research do benefit beyond feeling good. eg because they, or someone they care about might have or get cancer later and benefit from the research.
The article sets up (1) a straw man (2) with impossible to measure numbers. The author acknowledges the second fundamental flaw in the whole enterprise, but not the first.
What straw man? The assumptions underlying the theory of QF are spelled out cleanly in the original QF paper. The article is just enumerating these assumptions and showing they don't hold in reality.
The numbers in the example are indeed impossible to measure. But QF is claiming *optimality* -- that it maximizes social welfare -- when certain assumptions hold. To show that QF does not maximize social welfare when these assumptions don't hold, it suffices to show a single hypothetical counterexample.
I don't hold any cards in the game - if QF is bollocks, so be it, I couldn't care less.
The reasons why I've commented are:
1) the article does a really bad job at using words that matter to me, like "utility". If any theory – QF or OPs own line of thought – tells me that funding cancer research doesn't have utility for the person funding it, that theory is BS. I don't need a badly made up hypothetical counterexample for this.
2) The author contradicts themselves: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." – but then they go on and calculate the utility of spending money on saving lives not based on the utility of the contributors, because "that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize" (btw, who is "we"!?), but based on some arbitrary made-up value and number of saved lives.
Actually, everything you complain about is highly irrelevant. It can't be overstated how irrelevant your objection is.
(other than feeling good about those lives being saved, but that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize).
Your interpretation of this statement is that the contributors have a fixed marginal utility for every single dollar, so that they will consider the situation where they spend $1,000,000 per live saved to be superior to the situation where they spend $100,000. In other words, you're saying that welfare is a veblen good for the donor.
The author makes the argument that the mere act of spending more money to save lives is not the type of utility we should strive for to maximize social welfare.
Your utility in question is not about feeling good about saving people regardless of cost, it's about feeling good about saving people, precisely because it costs money and you personally spent money to do it.
By the way, why is that "your utility"? Why am I putting words in your mouth? Because you're disagreeing with the author and therefore necessarily put yourself at odds with the authors objection to the first interpretation. Hence you must necessarily agree with it, otherwise you're just trolling and that would be uncharitable of me to accuse you of. So, yes, you must have mistakenly chosen the silly interpretation.
I think I disagree with nkmnz' specifics. But I'm not sure! It's possible I might agree with nkmnz across the board.
This might be a case where someone familiar with the subject could follow what you're saying just fine, but most of us HN commenters don't know enough about the subject to get it. That can happen here (e.g. on physics topics). In any case I can't really follow your arguments closely.
Comments
I'm confused, aren't those flaws the article is pointing out, not claims the article is making?
I read it as claims the article was making. I too was confused, but perhaps that is just the communication?
I think the article was going for a comparison between extrinsic motivation (which they seem to claim the original quadratic funding requires) and intrinsic motivation. It seems they just chose a poor example. The article attempts to quantize the expected reward for the extrinsic motivation ("They each expect to experience €6,000,000 worth of individual utility") while it fails to quantize the expected reward for the intrinsic motivation ("But in the selfish scenario, total utility is 3 times higher, because the utility is experienced independently by each contributor, whereas utility of saved lives is experienced only once by each of the cancer patients).
I believe, it has to do with their narrow conception of "experience". I don't know how any rational person could expect to "experience" €6,000,000 worth of art as my first criticism. Now, it would be fair to say that the implication that the wealthy benefactors expect that experience could be seen as a criticism of quadratic funding. But to roll with that ludicrous expectation for the sake of argument and then to fail to give a similar expectation of reward from the experience of saving 60 lives is not a fair argument.
If I can "imagine" the benefactor expecting €6,000,000 worth of experience for knowing the art is on display at the local museum, I could "imagine" the benefactor expecting some non-zero-euro amount of experience for knowing 60 people survived cancer.
If we quantify the "experience" in euros for the first scenario, it seems unfair not to quantify the "experience" for the second scenario. In this case it is about being consistent in argument, which the article fails to do.
the article claims that a contributor to art benefits from enjoying the art and a contributor to cancer research doesn't (except for feeling good), and therefore quadratic funding would favor art contributions and disfavor cancer research contributions. GP claims (and i agree) that contributors to cancer research do benefit beyond feeling good. eg because they, or someone they care about might have or get cancer later and benefit from the research.
the challenge is that measuring benefit is hard.
The article sets up (1) a straw man (2) with impossible to measure numbers. The author acknowledges the second fundamental flaw in the whole enterprise, but not the first.
What straw man? The assumptions underlying the theory of QF are spelled out cleanly in the original QF paper. The article is just enumerating these assumptions and showing they don't hold in reality.
The numbers in the example are indeed impossible to measure. But QF is claiming *optimality* -- that it maximizes social welfare -- when certain assumptions hold. To show that QF does not maximize social welfare when these assumptions don't hold, it suffices to show a single hypothetical counterexample.
I don't hold any cards in the game - if QF is bollocks, so be it, I couldn't care less.
The reasons why I've commented are:
1) the article does a really bad job at using words that matter to me, like "utility". If any theory – QF or OPs own line of thought – tells me that funding cancer research doesn't have utility for the person funding it, that theory is BS. I don't need a badly made up hypothetical counterexample for this.
2) The author contradicts themselves: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." – but then they go on and calculate the utility of spending money on saving lives not based on the utility of the contributors, because "that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize" (btw, who is "we"!?), but based on some arbitrary made-up value and number of saved lives.
Actually, everything you complain about is highly irrelevant. It can't be overstated how irrelevant your objection is.
Your interpretation of this statement is that the contributors have a fixed marginal utility for every single dollar, so that they will consider the situation where they spend $1,000,000 per live saved to be superior to the situation where they spend $100,000. In other words, you're saying that welfare is a veblen good for the donor.
The author makes the argument that the mere act of spending more money to save lives is not the type of utility we should strive for to maximize social welfare.
Your utility in question is not about feeling good about saving people regardless of cost, it's about feeling good about saving people, precisely because it costs money and you personally spent money to do it.
By the way, why is that "your utility"? Why am I putting words in your mouth? Because you're disagreeing with the author and therefore necessarily put yourself at odds with the authors objection to the first interpretation. Hence you must necessarily agree with it, otherwise you're just trolling and that would be uncharitable of me to accuse you of. So, yes, you must have mistakenly chosen the silly interpretation.
I made you spend a quadratic amount of time on your reply than I did, so maybe you have mistakenly chosen the silly path of QF yourself.
I think I disagree with nkmnz' specifics. But I'm not sure! It's possible I might agree with nkmnz across the board.
This might be a case where someone familiar with the subject could follow what you're saying just fine, but most of us HN commenters don't know enough about the subject to get it. That can happen here (e.g. on physics topics). In any case I can't really follow your arguments closely.