> I make fun of Vox journalists a lot, but I want to give them credit where credit is due: they contain valuable organs, which can be harvested and given to others.
One of the funniest things Scott has ever written...
My Left Kidney
281–290 of 325 posts
Re: My Left Kidney
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And FTX blowing up was a major event in the course of that debate, since it starkly illustrated the weaknesses of a moral philosophy that centers numbers and dollars over the kind of traditional ethical judgement practiced by other charitable movements. Honestly, I think this just doesn't make sense (and I have no ties with EA whatsoever). You've written it nicely, but it just doesn't follow. It makes no sense to j…
I like the general idea of EA. But it's a human movement, and thus vulnerable to mismanagement and corruption that's characteristic of distributed organizations that manage large sums of money. To that end I've observed three worrying trends in the EA movement over past couple of years. They are (in no particular order):
1. To focus EA efforts on donations from high-net-worth individuals, often at the cost of giving these individuals massive influence over organizational priorities.
2. To shift (more) towards a longtermist philosophy, wherein "effectiveness" is determined by the wellness of hypothetical future beings, rather than measurable near-term impacts like "lives saved, bed nets distributed." This measurability was supposed to be the bedrock of EA, what kept it from becoming like other wasteful organizations.
3. As a consequence of (1) and (2), to shift the balance of internal priorities away from practical and measurable efforts, towards work like "AI alignment"; spending millions on book tours to promote EA/longtermist ideas; and spending on charities that provide facilities to help EA organizations "come up with ideas about the future."
4. To close ranks against outside criticism of EA's priorities, and to refuse any efforts for a community-wide re-evaluation of these new priorities, or to pose tough internal questions about donors or spending.
In this new regime, spending on luxurious meeting facilities ("castles") sits on equal footing with malaria nets. Because perhaps the ideas developed therein will save billions of future lives, or the facilities will encourage big new donations, and that's an organizational priority now. In any case, there's no way you can prove this won't happen, because nothing is empirically measurable. Also: castles are awesome.
None of these priorities represent the entirety of EA, but it's obvious that the opinionated people who control these (huge!) purse-strings are gradually gaining organizational control of the movement, to the (I suspect) long-term detriment of the "let's spend effectively on Malaria nets" wing. It's quite sad, but it's also exactly what I'd expect of an organization that is insufficiently defended against this kind of drift.
Far from "everything is great but SBF couldn't have been predicted," you see evidence of all these mismanagement in the events that I mention. First, there's the well-funded McCaskill book, which attempted to mainstream EA/longtermist priorities. This would not have been possible without (1) [and quite possibly, without stolen FTX deposits.] Then there's the presence of obvious grifters like SBF within the inner-circles of the community, and the fact that nobody with power was asking the obvious question about whether these people should be such an important part of the movement. (It did not take a lot of looking, apparently.)
And finally, you see it in the orgy of undisciplined, poorly-justified spending by EA organizations that occurred right at a time when they were deliberately courting increased prominence, including two different castles. All of this would be perfectly normal in a cult like Scientology, but has no place whatsoever in a mass-scale effective altruist movement.
Re: My Left Kidney
#283It'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,…
Grant Generoux claims his chronic kidney disease ("incurable, fatal") was healed by his low vitamin A diet. We know from studying technical outages and systems failures that the more checks and balances we put in place, the weirder the cause of any outage will be - because only the weird things get through where the gaps between the checks all line up. Of course the claim isn't wrapped up in a simple package with conclusive proof and widely agreed on - if it were, it would be mainstream accepted knowledge.
Why hasn't it been noticed? Because the damage is cumulative and long term - years or decades. Because it's fat soluble, so the effects are modified by the amount of fat eaten at the same time. Because the effects are diffuse - it's not showing up in one single organ. Because the effects look like other things - autoimmune attacks, for example. Because historic mistakes in studies have caused 'vitamin A toxicity' to get mixed up with 'Vitamin A defficiency'. Because it varies with different people with different liver storage capacity and historic retinol compound buildup. Because it may be masked by protective effects of Vitamin C or other dietary components. Because stopping eating it offers no quick fix, healing might be "wait years for damaged cells to die and new ones to grow". Because there's no money in telling people to eat less of somethings, so there's little industry funding incentive or research grants.
Here for example, one of the other people who agrees with the claim of Vitamin A being harmful shows their working: https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/topic/biotransformation-of... - Under Discussion it says "It is now no longer difficult to imagine how retinoic acid [ed: Vitamin A/retinol related compound] could cause auto-immune disease, since the data appears to show that retinoic acid is essentially a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is stored in the liver and, once the liver is saturated, in different types of tissue all over the body, especially in epithelial cells that constitute blood–tissue barriers, and in adipocytes, both of which were shown to express STRA6 (Amengual, Zhang et al. 2014). [... explanation continues]"
I am never going to study enough chemistry, biology, biochemistry, statistics, medicine, to be able to make a judgement call of my own about that page, let alone all the other studies people have linked to and pulled apart. At least it's cheap and relatively easy and low risk to try, but even if my health improves (I don't have kidney damage) it could easily be attributable to many other factors - placebo, for example.
Re: My Left Kidney
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Remember, if you can sell it, then a debt collector can force you to sell it. I'd much rather say "People can't sell their organs" than have a future where debt collectors manipulate people into parting out their bodies.
> Remember, if you can sell it, then a debt collector can force you to sell it.
This is not true at all. Debt collectors acting on their own can't take anything. A court can force you to sell certain things if you lose a lawsuit, but many assets are protected. They can't seize your 401k, in most states they can't take your primary residence unless the debt was taken on to purchase it in the first place, they can't garnish more than 25% of your income (and in some states can't garnish anything for consumer debt), they can't take social security income, and so on.
Re: My Left Kidney
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And FTX blowing up was a major event in the course of that debate, since it starkly illustrated the weaknesses of a moral philosophy that centers numbers and dollars over the kind of traditional ethical judgement practiced by other charitable movements. Honestly, I think this just doesn't make sense (and I have no ties with EA whatsoever). You've written it nicely, but it just doesn't follow. It makes no sense to j…
I like the general idea of EA. But it's a human movement, and thus vulnerable to mismanagement and corruption that's characteristic of distributed organizations that manage large sums of money. To that end I've observed three worrying trends in the EA movement over past couple of years. They are (in no particular order): 1. To focus EA efforts on donations from high-net-worth individuals, often at the cost of giving…
As someone in the "malaria nets wing", I think you're directionally correct, but overstating things.
> it's quite obvious that the opinionated people who control the (huge!) purse-strings are gradually gaining organizational control of the movement
This is to some extent true of Open Philanthropy, although the effect looks larger than it is because they're consciously committed to not throwing all of their resources behind whatever they think is the best option. I'm not a fan in principle, but it's not insane. See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/worldview-diversif... for their take.
GiveWell remains firmly on the global health side, and I don't see that changing. Here's the first my-screen-worth of organizations they've funded in the last year, with approximate numbers:
- 87 million to the Malaria Consortium
- 77 million to Hellen Keller International (Vitamin A supplementation)
- 42 million to New Incentives (infant vaccination)
- 17 million to Sightsavers (parasitic worms)
- 8 million to PATH (malaria)
- 6 million to Nutrition International (Vitamin A)
- 5 million to IRD Global (healthcare infrastructure)
- 5 million to Miracle Feet (clubfoot)
- 7 million to Deworm the World (parasitic worms)
- 2 million to RICE (postnatal care)
From https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl...
Re: My Left Kidney
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Some of my old coworkers were really into EA, LessWrong, and the rationalist co…
At the same time, don't you risk punishing him for dissecting and revealing his thought process in public, however flawed it may be? I don't think you want to discourage that, do you? The whole article is an exercise in motivated reasoning, and he comes right out and says as much.
If it was possible to discourage him from revealing his thought process in public wouldn't that have happened already? He's not been exactly shy about controversial takes on various topics.
Re: My Left Kidney
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do all EAs donate kidneys? Or even at higher rates than other groups? Everyone thinks their religion makes them better at being good. EAs might be uniquely positioned to demonstrate it statistically, if it's true.
The number of people who altruistically donate kidneys per year in the USA is like 1-200, so the fact that Scott knows multiple EAs who did so (and that the kidney donor people are used to EAs) is pretty high-tier evidence that either there are a LOT more EAs than I thought, or they do it MUCH higher rates than the general population.
Scott alone donating would probably set the rate of altruistic kidney donation at a higher rate among EAs than the general population, at least for this year; there'd have to be around 2M EAs in the USA to match the baseline rate, while the real number is almost certainly significantly lower.
Re: My Left Kidney
#288I’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).
He covers that in the post. If you donate your kidney, you can nominate up to 5 people to be first in line if they (or you) ever need a transplant. Given compatibility concerns, it's probably safer for your family member for you to donate than not.
If you donate a kidney knowing that if something goes wrong to the one you have left you can skip the queue of people who have been suffering potentially longer than you have with end stage renal failure, is your donation truely an altruistic one?
Re: My Left Kidney
#289I’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).
just so you know, around 1% of people die in conditions where their organs are elligible for transplantation. then there's the factor that kidneys from living donors generally last longer for the recipient
My grandmother donated both her kidneys before her life support was switched off she was brain dead tragically due to having a brain aneurysm at 51, but she was technically living when she donated since they keep people alive until they’ve completed the organ harvest. She also donated her heart, but unfortunately the transplant wasn’t successful at all.
One kidney failed after 3 years, the other kidney is still going strong. That person she saved has gone on to have 17 years of good health and counting, our family get’s anonymous letters letting us know the kidney is still going strong. It’s kind of nice.
If I don’t get to donate my organs to save lives, I’ll still donate them to science. I was Born with two kidneys and I like to think wanting to keep them for myself isn’t being greedy. If someone I love needs a kidney, I’ll donate to either them, or someone else so they can hopefully receive a kidney quicker, but otherwise, I have no desire to have a major surgical procedure, recovery etc. maybe I’m selfish, but I’ll at least be honest about it.
Re: My Left Kidney
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a number of lifestyle changes: healthier eating, quitting alcohol, staying out of the sun. On the other hand, maintaining these sound like a much larger effort than avoiding one CT scan. (That said, they do have other benefits so they might still make sense.)
Staying out of the sun has significant downsides.
Like what? I assume he's taking vitamin D3.