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My Left Kidney

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Re: My Left Kidney

#41

Post by FeepingCreature »

monero-xmr wrote: post #6
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many kidneys have you donated?

My brother has a kidney ailment, so the expected value of me donating to a stranger is less than the expected value of me donating to my brother. This is because my brother has the potential for children. If he has children, they may become doctors. If they become doctors, they will potentially save a huge number of people. Of course the risk of them not becoming doctors is high. So I should investigate who around me…

As the article said, if you donate, you can get your brother prioritized for a donation later.

Re: My Left Kidney

#42

Post by sooheon »

eutropia wrote: post #30
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

[flagged]

HN isn't really the place for this kind of vitriolic diatribe, because it's not all that conducive to thoughtful commentary. That Aside, > As if you can reduce "societal benefit" to some quantifiable number I assume your business doesn't mark any Goodwill value or other non-tangibles in its GAAP-compliant financial statements then?

GAAP compliance has no bearing on accuracy. Accounting intangibles are suggestions at best, the market discovers the true value of assets. Where's the market on bad EA ideas?

Re: My Left Kidney

#43

Post by Quinzel »

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).

Re: My Left Kidney

#44

Post by Version467 »

raverbashing wrote: post #18
BobaFloutist wrote: post #8

I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking. Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? Optics sometimes necessitate sacrificing the "mathematically superior choice" for one that's worse in the name of not pissing off a ton of people the support of whom you rely upon.

> Surely their reputation is a factor in their ability to do good? True. But the EA crowd has a hard time understand perception or empathy and has to resort to mathematical calculations I could think of a couple of ways better than "buying a castle" for conferences.

e/acc is short for effective accelerationism and not effective altruism. Those groups are interested in very different things.

Re: My Left Kidney

#45

Post by manmal »

> 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 space, I‘ve been hearing that cheaper CGMs are coming from the big players, apparently for <= $1 a day. This will allow people with diabetes to keep their time in the ideal BG range longer, reducing risk for kidney disease _significantly_.

Re: My Left Kidney

#46

Post by chris_va »

unholiness wrote: post #28
elromulous wrote: post #26

Can anyone (with a better understanding of radiation risks) confirm the math for the added mortality risk from a single CT? I know a CT is a lot of radiation, but the mortality risk seems very high.

His footnote says as much as I could: > Maybe. Kind of. Our knowledge of how radiation causes cancer comes primarily from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we can follow survivors who were one mile, two miles, etc, from the center of the blast, calculate how much radiation exposure they sustained, and see how much cancer they got years later. But by the time we’re dealing with CAT scan levels of radiation, cancer levels are so…

There is this story: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/

The conventional approach for radiation protection is based on the ICRP's linear, no threshold (LNT) model of radiation carcinogenesis, which implies that ionizing radiation is always harmful, no matter how small the dose. But a different approach can be derived from the observed health effects of the serendipitous contamination of 1700 apartments in Taiwan with cobalt-60 (T1/2 = 5.3 y). This experience indicates that chronic exposure of the whole body to low-dose-rate radiation, even accumulated to a high annual dose, may be beneficial to human health.

... though some evidence against it with leukemia it seems, but this is not my field.

Re: My Left Kidney

#47

Post by Waterluvian »

> The vast majority of donors, 98 to 99 percent, don’t have kidney failure later on. And those who do get bumped up to the top of the waiting list due to their donation.

Can’t help but picture a roller coaster queue wrapping around the back of a hospital, and some guy is cutting the “Singles” line, defending himself from scowls with, “I’m not cutting! I’m just getting my kidney back!”

Re: My Left Kidney

#48

Post by CamperBob2 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #37
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, there's the Achilles' heel of utilitarianism in general to deal with: "Even the very wise cannot see all ends." A cynic might say "Even the very wise cannot see any ends."

Then the cynic jumped out of a window. (Clearly, there is some ability to see ends.)

... and landed on some tracks just seconds ahead of a runaway trolley, derailing it before it could hit a busload of nuns.

Re: My Left Kidney

#49

Post by [deleted] »

elromulous wrote: post #26

Can anyone (with a better understanding of radiation risks) confirm the math for the added mortality risk from a single CT? I know a CT is a lot of radiation, but the mortality risk seems very high.

[deleted]

Re: My Left Kidney

#50

Post by Aurornis »

> Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”.

This feels like a spin on how this all went down. A lot of the anger about that group utilizing funds to, literally, buy a castle came from EA groups too.

Trying to downplay the situation and pretend that the anger was only coming from uninformed outsiders feels like a dishonest attempt to rewrite history.

If you’re not familiar with this story, here’s a source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...

There was a lot of debate about it in EA circles. A lot of it turned into mental gymnastics as they tried to find ways to explain how spending a amount of money on a literal castle so they could meet in it somehow had an expected value that was positive for humanity or something.

Weird to see this incident pop up in an article about kidney donation, but even weirder to see the critics of the decision downplayed and sneered as uninformed outsiders when so much of the anger came from inside the EA community. Really feels like a subtle signal that if you don’t toe the line on every EA organization decision, you must be an outsider.

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