Two weeks ago, I found out about Folding@home, and have been running it since then.
Today I finally got around to googling it a bit (exam period is over), and here is what I found:
- A 2011 post by gwern that explains why it might be harmful, and points out that Rosetta@home seems like a better option. (There is also some discussion about gwern's post in LessWrong).
- A 2012 reddit page with a top-voted answer that says that Folding@home unequivocally helped developing drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease.
- A 2015 quora page in which two Stanford people highly praise Folding@home.
- A 2016 quora page in which it is pointed out that Folding@home influenced the development of Markov State Models (MSMs).
- A 2017 quora page with an offensive criticism of gwern's post, whose main point (IIUC) is that gwern underestimated the potential of understanding protein folding.
- According to Wikipedia's Folding@home page and the official website of Rosetta@home, the projects run 98.7 petaFLOPS and 270 teraFLOPS respectively, so Folding@home is (roughly speaking) 365 times faster. (FLOPS stands for 'floating point operations per second', i.e., how fast you can do arithmetic of real numbers.)
So what do you think? Is running Folding@home beneficial? Is running Rosetta@home more beneficial? Or maybe running either is harmful?
Rather than get into the details, I'll make the meta-level point that the impact of your action here is likely to be very small in one direction or another.
At best, you are one more computer in a network of millions*; at worst, you've added a tiny amount of pollution to the air, which might take a few minutes to an hour off of humanity's collective lifespan, if we stick to Gwern's reasoning -- you might waste more human life in the course of spending time to install the software than you would actually running the program.
Meanwhile, the "indirect costs" are based mostly on money you could otherwise donate to charity, a consideration which could come up every time you spend money on anything (and which is generally better to ignore unless you're making a big spending decision; I wouldn't worry about $10/year).
Given the complexity of the issue (e.g. trying to calculate your computer's extra electricity usage, evaluating the expected value of papers produced through FAH), I would recommend against trying to make a serious calculation of your impact. As with many questions people ask in EA spaces, "don't worry about it" is a reasonable answer.
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*There are only about 100,000 machines in the FAH network right now, but many of those were designed specifically for high-performance computation; I'd be unsurprised if an average home machine contributed one-millionth or less of the project's processing power.
I certainly don't endorse "always optimize"! I spend far too much time reading manga and trying to win Magic: the Gathering tournaments for that. I fully endorse analyzing things that are interesting/entertaining. But it seems bad to get stuck with something that is both low-expected-impact and low-interest. Someone who really likes Folding@Home should totally give the analysis a go; someone who doesn't care and just wants evaluation practice has many other options.