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The cochlear implant question

aeon.co

151–158 of 158 posts

Re: The cochlear implant question

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internal part can be replaced too. The gain you get from implanting as soon as possible is massive compared to waiting it off. No one truly considering it should be waiting and instead actually pushing for an implant as soon as possible. For our son, in the UK in 2019, they asked us to wait until our son was one year old. We insisted to have him implanted as soon as possible and us being ready to do it at 6 month…

Hi, I have an 8 week old deaf daughter in the UK and id love to talk to you about your experience getting the cochlear implant, particularly how you were able to get it so early If you're happy to could you get in touch via my email in bio? Thanks

Sure. Thanks for having contacted me.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#152
post #148
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultures come and go, arising from circumstances that can change. Does preservation of a living culture take priority over the wellbeing of its members? Perhaps a culture is something that can be decommissioned humanely.

English is the dominant language at the moment. Should Quebec abandon French? Should Europe? The rest of the world?

Singapore did exactly this under Lee Kuan Yew, and transformed itself from essentially a wasteland into one of the top countries in the world both in economic and quality-of-life terms. In the opinion of many (though of course not all) who went through that difficult transition, yes, it was more than worth it.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#153
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are taking issue with escalating an already dismissive argument to infinity. It's Godwin's law - even if you're calling the other guy Hitler, you still brought it up in the first place

I’m pointing out the argument’s absurdity. Saying that things don’t last forever to justify destroying something you don’t value, can easily be redirected to something you do value

The point at issue is: What subset of things (what individuals, groups, ideas, cultures) "deserve" to continue?

I agree that your reductio ad absurdum argument shows that "nothing deserves to continue" is in untenable position. But surely the opposite extreme (namely, "everything deserves to continue") is just as absurd?

So the question remains: Where to draw the line?

Re: The cochlear implant question

#154
post #47

I feel like the narrative around disabled people has advanced to the point where some now insist that they aren't disabled. In reality, it's a pretty objective fact that being disabled means being unable to do something. It is a net negative on someone's quality of life. I'd be jolly pissed off if my parent decided not to get me an implant that enabled me to hear just because someone had told them that being deaf was…

> being deaf was actually the same as being able to hear. That's not even close to the argument being presented. The fundamental crisis within the deaf community is around the fact that deaf people share a common language . This is very different than most other disabled communities. Language is fundamental to shared culture. To be clear, I'm not saying that deaf children should not be given cochlear implants, but th…

For avoidance of doubt, I'll flip the polarity of your adoption hypothetical: In my opinion, a Chinese family adopting an ethnically European child have no obligation to teach that child "Western values" or "Western culture". Their only obligation is to raise that child with love and care.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#155
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultures come and go, arising from circumstances that can change. Does preservation of a living culture take priority over the wellbeing of its members? Perhaps a culture is something that can be decommissioned humanely.

We need to decommission the culture of this website that makes straightforward eugenics a popular position here.

Where is your threshold for "culture"?

Because you do have such a threshold, and you consider things that fall below that threshold not to be "culture", and therefore not to be worth preserving.

Which leads to: How do you justify this choice of threshold?

Re: The cochlear implant question

#156
The outright selfishness of Lane, Humphries et al. is mind blowing, and publicly advocating for it would (in the modern world) rightly lead to ostracism in any other context.

It is nothing more and nothing less than "I suffered, so you should suffer, too" -- the same attitude that keeps the "culture" of female genital mutilation alive.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pointing out the argument’s absurdity. Saying that things don’t last forever to justify destroying something you don’t value, can easily be redirected to something you do value

The point at issue is: What subset of things (what individuals, groups, ideas, cultures) "deserve" to continue? I agree that your reductio ad absurdum argument shows that "nothing deserves to continue" is in untenable position. But surely the opposite extreme (namely, "everything deserves to continue") is just as absurd? So the question remains: Where to draw the line?

‘The people’. Whatever scale that is. Democracy as imperfect and inefficient it is, is our best vehicle for the collective consciousness (of humanity) to decide at the scale of a polity. A family can decide amongst themselves what’s best for their infant, and as they grow, the person can decide for themselves as an individual. Moralizing on the behalf of others, is at best performative, at worst harmful and denigrating. It of course gets messy when we’re talking about irreversible decisions made by parents, but I don’t believe that’s relevant for cochlear implants. Certainly not relevant for continuing a culture either

Re: The cochlear implant question

#158

As the hearing brother of a deaf sister with hearing parents, what I usually tell people is to learn sign language and get the cochlear. Forcing only cochlear on the child means that the family does not live in the deaf world with their child, while only speaking SL might distance them and cause them to miss out on a lot in the hearing world. It reminds me of basque spain, where everyone speaks catalan and some peopl…

Hearing people always assume to make a good decision for any Deaf child by sharing the two worlds. Deaf child will always always be deprived with a lot of information. If parents learn sign language, it does not mean that they include a Deaf child in any kind of conversations. You chose not to listen to our life experience in the hearing world. We know what it is like to miss out a lot of information because you would not sign 24/7. If you sign, you would use voice at the same time. Simcom is not a language. Having a cochlear implant would not make him/her hearing. They will continue to struggle with all information
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