161–170 of 325 posts
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…
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> Like, if they rejected him from bureaucratic incompetence as they tried to filter out people who can't consent to surgery? Fine, incompetence is bad, but fine. I'd be even more charitable to them: it's not incompetency, but waste inherent in a bureaucratic process, which is a consequence of scale. Sure, it would be better if Scott was interviewed with someone dedicated and empowered, who could hear and verify the f…
> And sure, it sucks to be the one rejected by an effectively automated process[0], but it's better for everyone than not having any process at all. You could have a much lighter weight process, that leaves more of the decision making powers with individuals and families. That would be cheaper and overall suck less.
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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 choi…
It does not take a genius to understand how bad it looks to buy a castle in the UK
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.
Aside from the nervous system, pairing is the default condition of all mammalian organs which develop from the mesoderm or ectoderm: they can then go on to fuse into a single larger structure, as with the heart, but as far as I know they're never simply lost on one side during normal development.
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> We have a long waiting list for recipients, and we don't have an excess of donors to be picky with. That’s not how this works. Organ donation is inherently picky and fallible: without that pickiness, you get coerced organ donation and people undergoing mental crises seeking a form of salvation. I don’t understand where the moral judgement or grudge determination came from: everything I’ve said is a prima facie plau…
> Organ donation is inherently picky and fallible: without that pickiness, you get coerced organ donation [...] What is your evidence for this claim?
(There’s also familial coercion, but that wasn’t present in this case presumably.)
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…
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Effective altruism, which is both a general (and not especially objectionable) variant of act utilitarianism, and also a specific community that has (fairly, to my eye) been accused of diverting money towards a particular set of reactionary worldviews held by its leadership.
The main recipients of EA political funding (what little there is: the majority of money goes to global health and development, with AI safety as a distant second) are centrist Democrats. They're too right-wing for my taste too, but calling them "reactionaries" dilutes the word into meaninglessness.
I’m keeping both my kidneys for if someone I love needs one. When I am dead however, they can take my kidneys, heart, lungs, liver and whatever else that is salvageable and give them to whoever needs them (assuming I die in the right circumstances that this is possible).
Given compatibility concerns, it's probably safer for your family member for you to donate than not.
The truth is it's likely a threshold exists, likely under .1 Sv, but its really, really hard to determine becauses at those percentage cancer causes tends to mix up. I think US and German environmental agencies support the non-threshold model as a tool to absolutely reduce radiation contamination in the environment, but I know French doctors (or at least radiologists) think this is bullshit and think the model is both wrong (like all models) and useless in their discipline.
I just checked to be certain I was right, and I am, in fact French doctors rejected the model in 2005, citing a boatload of work on radiation, and also epidemiologic studies (background radiation is more concentrated in areas that have decreased chances of developing cancers apparently, which is weird, but i'm taking a break and do not have time to check out more)
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> Like, if they rejected him from bureaucratic incompetence as they tried to filter out people who can't consent to surgery? Fine, incompetence is bad, but fine. I'd be even more charitable to them: it's not incompetency, but waste inherent in a bureaucratic process, which is a consequence of scale. Sure, it would be better if Scott was interviewed with someone dedicated and empowered, who could hear and verify the f…
> And sure, it sucks to be the one rejected by an effectively automated process[0], but it's better for everyone than not having any process at all. You could have a much lighter weight process, that leaves more of the decision making powers with individuals and families. That would be cheaper and overall suck less.