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My Left Kidney

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Re: My Left Kidney

#111

Post by tux3 »

johnfn wrote: post #98
BobaFloutist wrote: post #8

I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.

It's easy to say in retrospect, but it's not like all the movement ever did in it's entire existence was buy a single castle. Do you really think they were expecting EA to explode in the public consciousness after the SBF thing and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited for what could make the best outrage-bait article? That's quite a black swan event.

>and to have all of their line-items exhaustively audited [...]?

That part they should have expected (and I'm sure they did). Scott claims they expected negative social reactions, just maybe not to this extent.

Even in the absence of journalist attention, EAs love to exhaustively audit line-items. Something as big as Wytham Abbey was clearly not going to escape commentary.

I don't follow why SBF somehow excuses this. It seems you're suggesting buying the abbey would have been fine if only it could have been kept quiet, but because of this unforeseeable black swan event people heard about the Secret EA Castle and now we have all this outrage.

I heard about it from the EA Adjacent forum, and I don't see what SBF has to do with the argument that this burned a lot of social capital and reputation within the community for very nebulous gains (compared to buying a counterfactual property). The abbey might be relatively cheap for what it is, but not absolutely cheap. And it turned out to be very expensive in other ways.

Re: My Left Kidney

#112

Post by sfn42 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #62
sashank_1509 wrote: post #27

This does honestly kind of shock me, it’s respectable that he did something like this for a random person but I could never imagine myself doing it for anyone except close family. I used to think EA was some kooky AI safety Cult but if so many EA folks donate their kidney, my opinion of them has improved far more. They at least have balls!

> I used to think EA was some kooky AI safety Cult but if so many EA folks donate their kidney, my opinion of them has improved far more. They at least have balls! They are both a kooky AI safety Cult and they do things like donate kidneys and fund malaria nets. They are a kooky AI safety cult because there is a reasonable argument to make that AGI is the most plausible, preventable human extinction event[1] in the n…

I don't think it's very reasonable to think "AI" is more of an existential threat than global warming and nuclear weapons. In fact I'd say that's a ridiculous claim.

The only way I can see AI causing total extinction is a Terminator-like scenario where an AI completely takes over, self-sustains by manufacturing killer robots and running power plants etc. It's literally science fiction. CharGPT is cool and all, really impressive stuff, but it's nowhere near some sort of superintelligent singularity that wipes us out.

We don't even know if it's possible to build something like that, and even if we did there's a huge gap between creating it and it actually taking over somehow.

Global warming and nukes are two things we know could wipe out pretty much everyone. Sure it might not be a complete extinction but we know for a fact it can be a near extinction which is more than can be said for "AI". And as far as I'm concerned a full extinction and a near extinction are basically equally bad.

I also think you're underestimating by saying they won't kill everyone. They might. Nuclear fallout is a thing, you don't have to be nuked to die from nukes. Nuclear winter is another thing. Climate change could end up making the atmosphere toxic or shut down most oxygen production which would certainly be a total extinction.

These are real threats, AI is hypothetical.

Re: My Left Kidney

#113

Post by TeMPOraL »

lispisok wrote: post #25
BobaFloutist wrote: post #8

I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.

This stuck out to me too. If Effective Altruism is about using math to figure out how to do the most good they seemed to have ignored higher order effects of their actions. What if buying the castle hurt Effective Altruism's reputation so less people got into EA so less people donated money to buy mosquito nets or malarial regions in Africa resulting is less overall good?

There's a danger here, of which I imagine they're aware - higher-order effects are very hard to estimate in chance and magnitude, or in how your actions specifically contributed to them. This makes them perfect for justifying whatever you want, intentionally or accidentally. Overemphasize some positive second-order effects, fail to notice some negative second-order effects, and suddenly your first-order selfish choice looks like a charity. Societies and markets are dynamic systems, so predicting outcomes is less like predicting path of a rocket from Newton's laws, and more like predicting the weather.

Re: My Left Kidney

#114

Post by tux3 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #40

It's a good read. I enjoyed the data analysis and his snarky wit about a few things. I enjoyed him finding out he could apply to another hospital and doing it "out of spite." I know he wants to encourage you to donate a kidney. I still wish we tried harder to heal the "original equipment from the manufacturer" we are all born with. I have been on the record a long time with this opinion. I get a lot of hatred for it,…

>I still wish we tried harder to heal the "original equipment from the manufacturer" we are all born with

You know that this is hard. Are you saying we should just spend more in that particular area instead of spending on kidney transplants?

Eventually research will improve and we may need less transplants, but in the meantime they're a great solution, and according to a quick search those transplants actually save the healthcare system money.

Research is great. But the flashy solution turns out to be also great, pays for itself, and yields concrete results today. Sometimes I think there's too much of a reaction against flashy, to the point that people discount the flashy things that are good.

We should judge things on the outcomes and the costs, not superficially on whether they feel boring or flashy!

Re: My Left Kidney

#115

Post by bradley13 »

illys wrote: post #107

The author states: "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" And demonstrates with: "This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. 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." Sorry but there is a flaw here: calculation seems good but conclusion is completely wrong. Calculation: increased…

You're not wrong, but he's probably farther off that that. Danger from radiation doesn't scale linearly, although (to be extra safe) standards are set as if it is. In fact, there is some evidence that small doses of radiation can even be beneficial (hormesis).

Re: My Left Kidney

#116

Post by inglor_cz »

illys wrote: post #107

The author states: "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" And demonstrates with: "This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. 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." Sorry but there is a flaw here: calculation seems good but conclusion is completely wrong. Calculation: increased…

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

For someone as smart as Scott Alexander, this is an astonishing mistake.

If CTs were such death machines, we would have seen a worldwide epidemics of CT-related cancers. There is no way you can cover up such a strong signal, given that people are screened all the time.

Edit: thanks for unleashing such an interesting debate. I guess the problem is in my perception. "Risk of dying from the exam" means lifetime risk, while my perception was "1 of 660 people who get the exam drops dead pretty soon afterwards".

Re: My Left Kidney

#117

Post by mort96 »

This was an enjoyable read.

The solution of giving people money to donate their kidneys is terrifying to me however. I do not like the thought of desperate people selling their internal organs to survive one bit.

Of course, if inequality was dealt with and nobody was desperately poor, it would be a different question. If everyone had enough money to comfortably get by, and the extra $100,000 from a kidney donation would just go to luxury goods, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But that's not the world we live in.

Re: My Left Kidney

#118

Post by snarkconjecture »

illys wrote: post #107

The author states: "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" And demonstrates with: "This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. 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." Sorry but there is a flaw here: calculation seems good but conclusion is completely wrong. Calculation: increased…

You did it wrong.

One Sv increases your absolute risk of fatal cancer by an added 5% or so. It doesn't multiply it by 1.05.

Quoting Wikipedia: "According to the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), one sievert results in a 5.5% probability of eventually developing fatal cancer based on the disputed linear no-threshold model of ionizing radiation exposure."

Also, where on earth did you get 1% as a "depressing" upper bound from? For lifetime risk of dying of cancer? It's over 15% in the US.

Re: My Left Kidney

#119

Post by rutierut »

It was completely baffling to me how someone as brilliant as SA could conclude that "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660".

However, the paper he references does contain the specific example:

> For example, a 40-year-old woman undergoing CT coronary angiography is estimated to have a 1 in 270 chance of developing cancer at a radiation dose of approximately 20 mSv

At this point I'm completely lost here.

Re: My Left Kidney

#120

Post by snarkconjecture »

inglor_cz wrote: post #116
illys wrote: post #107

The author states: "the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" And demonstrates with: "This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. 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." Sorry but there is a flaw here: calculation seems good but conclusion is completely wrong. Calculation: increased…

"the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660" For someone as smart as Scott Alexander, this is an astonishing mistake. If CTs were such death machines, we would have seen a worldwide epidemics of CT-related cancers. There is no way you can cover up such a strong signal, given that people are screened all the time. Edit: thanks for unleashing such an interesting debate. I guess the problem is in my perception.…

It would be astonishing if it were a mistake.

And yes, it's a detectable signal. "in a large population-based cohort it was found that up to 4% of brain cancers were caused by CT scan radiation" --somewhere on Wikipedia

CT scans vary in dosage. Wiki gives ~10 Sv for an abdominal CT; I don't know where Scott got 30, but maybe the kidney screening is multiple scans or otherwise higher dose. Or he was wrong by a factor of 3, which is not a factor of 100.

CT scans aren't done frivolously, and the current rate of scans is hotly debated for exactly this reason. I'm a little surprised that kidney donation involves CT over MRI by default, but I'm not an expert.

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