My Left Kidney

This is deeply fallacious binary thinking.

Take anything you like. A cause, religious group, political party, sports fanbase, etc.

Some subset of each group are generally decent people, who do their best to be good to the people around them, and to live their lives in a generally moral and ethical manner.

Some subset of each group have no interest in morals or ethics, and attach themselves to the group for purely selfish reasons.

Judging the entire group based on the selfish or amoral subset is a logical fallacy of the most basic sort, and is bordering religiosity. This is even more problematic when you look at the kinds of negative EA situations that have (rightly) caused controversy. The high profile big money cases get attention.

If confronted with someone who ascribes to the EA philosophy and by all measurable indicators has done incredibly good things for the world, would you be willing to change your mind?

It depends on the QoL improvement factor you assign to self-satisfaction I suppose? Just multiply that by the expected number of years left in their life.

A lot of EAs, including the author of this piece, are also really into IQ, eugenics and "human biodiversity" (aka race science). Consider that Scott Alexander (aka squid314) once expressed a desire to donate to "Project Prevention", a eugenics charity formulated to pay undesirables to sterilize themselves [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131230050925/http://squid314.l...

While I've appreciated some of the author's articles in the past, I think the numbers in this one miss the mark quite a bit.

> the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660

> The usual rule of thumb is that one extra Sievert = 5% higher risk of dying from cancer, so a 30 mS dose increases death risk about one part in 660.

Well not quite. First of all, this assumes that exposure events are additive over a lifetime (rather than individual events being more damaging at higher doses). This does seem to be the case, though I'm curious if we really know.

More to the point, it's a 5% increase of chance of death from cancer. Combining 5% with 30mSv/1Sv, you get an extra 0.15% chance of dying of cancer indeed.

But the chance of dying of cancer in the U.S. is something like 17.5%, although that does increase (and then decrease) with advanced age. According to https://usafacts.org/articles/americans-causes-of-death-by-a... , something like 29% deaths in the 65-74 age group are cancer, while in the 75-84 year age group it drops again to 25%.

Regardless, this means if you figure out your lifetime chance of dying by cancer based on your current age, it's 30% at the most (in aggregate, obviously personal risk factors vary a lot from person to person).

A 0.15% increase in that is 0.045% additional chance of dying by cancer, or 1 in 2,222. Using the average mortality incidence of 17.5% its more like 1 in 3800. And for someone who's this concerned about dying of cancer and I assume limiting risk factors much more than the average citizen, perhaps it's a 1 in 5000 chance.

All in all you're much more likely to reduce your chance of death by cancer by much more than a CT will increase it, via a number of lifestyle changes: healthier eating, quitting alcohol, staying out of the sun.

I'm inclined to think there might undiscovered evolution advantage that we still have two kidneys today. (Most of our parts have two for good reasons)