251–260 of 325 posts
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
William McCaskell wrote and promoted a book in August 2022, in an effort to popularize and justify the sorts of “longtermist” utilitarian views held by (some, increasingly dominant) EA folks. Allegedly this was backed by a multi-million dollar PR budget, which is why it got so much press at the time, and also why so many people were talking about EA philosophies last summer — even before FTX. I think your response is…
Honestly, I would have respected "I wanted to do it, I became obsessed with doing it, I knew it was likely dangerous and I can't quantify how dangerous, but it did it anyway because I thought it was important" more than this many-page attempt to mathematize the un-mathematizable.
Which I guess raises a larger point about how the rationalist and EA and other similar communities have a tendency to try to reduce fiendishly complex multivariable human issues to equations and statistics without realizing that some problems are not math problems and will defy any attempt to be quantified, statistitized, or calculated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So in total, a donation produces about 10-20 extra quality-adjusted life years. How much would you say the donor benefits?
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.
An anecdote to go along with his rejection. Once I got rejected from doing a medical donation in US because in the giant table of family sicknesses they gave me I marked X next to one of the mental conditions for my father who was an alcoholic because apparently alcoholism technically is that kind of mental condition (yes, the X had to be explained in the form, which I did). As you can imagine alcoholism is not that…
Alcoholism is that heritable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345133/ At ~50% heritability, it is in no way unusually low, and entirely comparable with many other traits.
> Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. Another solution would be to tackle type 2 diabetes, since a big amount of kidney failures is caused by that. Apparently, 1/3 of Americans are at risk: https://www.health.com/cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic-syndr... Having worked for a few years in the diabetes spac…
GLP1 drugs are also very promising for reducing the rate of kidney disease.
I've always enjoyed this author's work, but there's something almost pathological about the way he assumes that the risks of this act are well-quantified enough to make a rational mathematical decision about it, or that those risks are even well-quantifiable at all; there are ten thousand paths to medical complication here that aren't captured in "this is the percentage of healthy kidney donors who died during the op…
Eh, I felt that already came across strongly in the article itself. He attempted to quantify the risk, but every avenue resulted in "it's fine, maybe?", and he chose to go ahead with it despite not having any dependable numbers.
I've always enjoyed this author's work, but there's something almost pathological about the way he assumes that the risks of this act are well-quantified enough to make a rational mathematical decision about it, or that those risks are even well-quantifiable at all; there are ten thousand paths to medical complication here that aren't captured in "this is the percentage of healthy kidney donors who died during the op…