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My Left Kidney

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Re: My Left Kidney

#171

Post by sfn42 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149
sfn42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. AI x-risk is effectively a superset of global warming, nuclear war, engineering bioweapons, grey goo scenario, lethal geoengineering, and pretty much anything else that isn't just Earth winning the cosmic extinction lottery (asteroids, gamma ray bursts…

This is mostly hypotheticals. I can't argue against hypothetical problems, so all I'm going to say is I'm not convinced this is a danger.

I also don't agree that helping humans make scientific progress is a danger. We already have the tools to wipe ourselves out, adding more of them doesn't really change much. It might well help us discover ways to improve things, and whatever we discover it's up to us how we use it.

We don't know what the future holds. GPT-4 may be close to the limit of current possibility. It is not given that we will discover significant improvements. Even if we do discover significant theoretical improvements it is not given that it will be feasible with current nor near-future hardware.

I can agree that there exists hypothetical potential for danger, but to put that hypothetical risk higher than real threats is in my view exaggeration.

Re: My Left Kidney

#172

Post by jrockway »

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.

The real question is why didn't evolution give us two hearts and two brains?

Re: My Left Kidney

#173

Post by Taniwha »

eru wrote: post #133
abainbridge wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% cha…

One of the reasons they do the scan is that they look at both kidneys only take your WORST one

Re: My Left Kidney

#174

Post by XorNot »

jrockway wrote: post #172
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.

The real question is why didn't evolution give us two hearts and two brains?

Kind of obvious for both of them though: evolving two hearts is putting two pumping systems in parallel on the same fluid reservoir. Given how the pump works (evolution can't handle making gears in general), you'd need a precise synchronization system to keep everything working properly - you're basically much more likely to die from the "high availability" system then a very robust single system (and the usual proviso: evolution doesn't need you alive, it needs you to reproduce and the offspring have some decent chance of survival. Percentage survival rates are just fine.)

Same for the brain but I'd say writ large: easier to make an extra human then try and coordinate a redundant brain.

Re: My Left Kidney

#175

Post by Smaug123 »

jrockway wrote: post #172
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.

The real question is why didn't evolution give us two hearts and two brains?

Those ones are much easier to answer: they require very good coordination between each other. "Split-brain" is literally a canonical failure mode in the study of distributed systems, for example. (We kind of do have two brains, right, linked by the corpus callosum; there's a reason they're so close together.)

Re: My Left Kidney

#176

Post by DoreenMichele »

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.

I remember reading an article about people in poor countries selling a kidney and thereafter being too sick to work as fishermen or whatever. Some charity was trying to discourage poor people from selling body parts as a get-rich-quick scheme.

I'm skeptical this will have little to no impact on quality of life and productivity for the author.

Re: My Left Kidney

#177

Post by Smaug123 »

orwin wrote: post #169

The linear non-threshold model is... Quite contested however. 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 r…

(This is discussed in footnote 2 of the article.)

Re: My Left Kidney

#178

Post by mort96 »

fritzo wrote: post #166
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…

What is it that makes "giving people money to donate their time " so much less repugnant? Is it that time is finely divisible, whereas kidneys come in twos?

It's not necessarily much less repugnant. The fact that rich people can spend their time doing whatever they want, while a lot of people have to burn themselves out working two jobs to make ends meet, is abhorrent. However, the ability to make ends meet through selling your organs is a line most societies haven't crossed, and I'd prefer to keep it that way to be honest.

And for better or worse, we do tend to see a difference between forcing people to sell their time and forcing people to "sell their body". It's one (among many) reasons why societies tend to look down on prostitution, for example. Prostitution, like paid organ donation, is the kind of thing that I see no issue with people doing voluntarily, but I take issue with systems which "force" people to do it out of desperation.

I think society would be better if we started viewing the selling of one's time more like we currently view the "selling of one's body". I think society would be worse if we started viewing the selling of one's organs more like we currently view the selling of one's time. We want people to labour in order to keep society going, just like we want people to donate kidneys to help people in need, but we don't want an unfair division of labour where an underclass is working 80 hours per week while an upper class has all the free time they could wish for, and we don't want an unfair division of kidney donations where an underclass feels forced to donate their kidneys while the rest of society never even has to think about it.

Re: My Left Kidney

#179

Post by bawolff »

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

I mean, i don't think its for lack of trying.

Re: My Left Kidney

#180

Post by DoreenMichele »

bawolff wrote: post #179
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 I mean, i don't think its for lack of trying.

I was bluntly told "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game." I replied "It may be true that I will always be infected with something but this particular infection has to go as it's killing me."

My doctor physically took a step back as if I had slapped him.

I'm quite confident it's due to lack of trying. If you have zero goal of actually getting me better, please don't blame my condition for your failure to get me better.

That seems blindingly obvious to me. I want to spit nails that it gets so casually hand-waved off.

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