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My Left Kidney

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Re: My Left Kidney

#131

Post by cjbprime »

sfn42 wrote: post #112
aidenn0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> an AI completely takes over, self-sustains by manufacturing killer robots and running power plants etc.

You don't need any killer robots at all if you possess a superhuman level of persuasion. You can use killer humans instead.

Re: My Left Kidney

#132

Post by TeMPOraL »

abainbridge wrote: post #123
abainbridge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper he links to [1] broadly agrees with his statement, eg "An estimated 1 in 270 women who underwent a coronary angiography CT at age 40 will develop cancer from that CT (1 in 600 men), compared with an estimated 1 in 8,100 women who had routine head CT at the same age (1 in 11, 080 men)". 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4635397/

The thing I don't understand is that if the CT scan is more dangerous than having a kidney removed, then surely they'd take the kidney out to see if it was compatible with the recipient rather than give you such a dangerous scan.

I'm guessing that is more dangerous than given you've cleared the CT scan and other tests>. Plus, , might be more dangerous than either.

Re: My Left Kidney

#133

Post by eru »

abainbridge wrote: post #123
abainbridge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper he links to [1] broadly agrees with his statement, eg "An estimated 1 in 270 women who underwent a coronary angiography CT at age 40 will develop cancer from that CT (1 in 600 men), compared with an estimated 1 in 8,100 women who had routine head CT at the same age (1 in 11, 080 men)". 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4635397/

The thing I don't understand is that if the CT scan is more dangerous than having a kidney removed, then surely they'd take the kidney out to see if it was compatible with the recipient rather than give you such a dangerous scan.

The kidney surgery only looks so low risk (partially) because they only do it on people that passed the CT scan.

(To give an even more extreme example for illustration:

Suppose the scan could perfectly predict who will die from the surgery and who will live without any side effects. Suppose 90% of people fall into the former and 10% of people fall into the latter category. Suppose further that the scan has a 0.1% chance of killing you.

If you scan people beforehand, it will look like the surgery has 0% chance of complications against 0.1% of the scan. But if you dropped the scan, all of a sudden the surgery would have a 90% death rate.)

Re: My Left Kidney

#134

Post by eru »

mort96 wrote: post #117

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 wo…

Iran allows paying compensation to kidney donors. You can study how they are doing. Hint: they don't have much of a wait list.

> I do not like the thought of desperate people selling their internal organs to survive one bit.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market

Do you prefer desperate people have fewer options? Especially, do you prefer taking options from people that they prefer to take?

Re: My Left Kidney

#135

Post by eru »

ckdot2 wrote: post #83

There are so many unknowns and unknown unknowns in medical sciense, especially regarding the human body. Did evolution really keep two kidneys if you actually just need one? I doubt it. When considering a donation you should also not only think about if you might die. There are more factors like quality of life. In the end, a whole organ will be removed from your body. This will have some effect.

Kidneys are relatively close to the surface. So you can injure them mechanically.

Perhaps our ancestors kept their two kidneys around, but we can do with less, because our physical environment isn't as dangerous?

Re: My Left Kidney

#136

Post by eru »

low_tech_love wrote: post #95
laserlight wrote: post #89

> People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after lookin…

Whenever I read anything from these people I just keep thinking "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." They rely on "the math checks out" as an excuse for basically doing whatever they want. Here is some real-world math: how about "the math doesn't check out because people will look at your castle and think you're full of shit?"

Have you donated a kidney recently?

Re: My Left Kidney

#137

Post by eru »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #14

Good for Scott for actually looking at the research and then following through in a charitable action that is consistent with his beliefs. I'm surprised by how relatively risky the scan creening seems to be though.

Well, he found a less risky substitute.

Re: My Left Kidney

#138

Post by nyssos »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #124
charia wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life. People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist. The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same,…

> The EA view of things is pretty simple to understand. Given the premise of limited resources, and a belief that all lives are worth the same, how can you best improve human livelihood? Not quuiiite. Many other groups would accept that value, framed that way, maybe even a majority of people. What differentiates EA isn't their intention to improve livelihood, but their belief that it is possible to know how to do tha…

> It's not obvious to me that EA's approach to the constraints is more effective than the noble eightfold path or love your neighbor as yourself.

Ok, but that's not the competing option here. However good being a bodhisattva is, being a bodhisattva and saving someone from kidney failure is even better. And most people, of course, aren't going to become bodhisattvas at all: we're only choosing between being ordinary flawed people... and ordinary flawed people who also saved someone from kidney failure.

Re: My Left Kidney

#139

Post by cjbprime »

zabzonk wrote: post #9

Wow. Bonkers. Also, prolix. Evolution has equipped us with two kidneys for presumably good reasons. Don't go giving one away unless you really have to.

Evolution doesn't imply a cause to every attribute. Totally plausible that having one kidney is advantageous, our bodies have general bilateral symmetry of organs, there is no strong selection pressure against having that symmetry result in two kidneys, hence we have two. Most of your DNA is "non-functional". Evolution does not have a plan.
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