If this comment was made with the implicit intent and understanding of money as an abstraction of the resources we have available, I don’t see why it hasn’t been upvoted through the stratosphere yet.
In a perfect world, an answer to “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life?” would always be yes, because in the imaginary perfect world you can always get the $ 1 000 000 without taking it from somewhere else.
It really, really hurts me when I see that the best options being offered by even the brightest minds and best visionaries in a given group all revolve around better redistribution of these million dollars, and not one of them asks “What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
“What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.
Then we weren’t looking for a solution to this problem statement, or we failed.
The problem statement I wish were posed is: Currently, there is an attribution of (e.g.) medical resources, where wealthier people have priority and every application of medical resources prevents the application of important resources in some other place, medical or otherwise. Can we change this situation around so that the opportunity cost of any given life-changing attribution of (e.g.) medical resources will always be lower than the returns of this attribution (e.g. productivity of the healed person)?
Naturally, this is intended to be a comprehensive “opportunity cost” calculation where “killing off all elders so that the overall medical opportunity cost of healing young persons becomes lower” is an appropriately taxed option. Still an option, perhaps a repugnant one, but at least one that is properly appraised. If there’s currently no known good way to appraise this, then perhaps that might be a good first step?
Are you serious? Why shouldn’t elders get treatment if they’ve paid taxes or insurance all their life? Who’d want to take part in a society knowing they’d be euthenased when the time comes?
DaFranker wasn’t offering mercy killing, DaFranker was offering termination when no longer economically viable (Ans possible recycyling into Soylent Green..why let protein go to waste
I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.
You take something you’d really dislike and assume that everyone else would also dislike it to close to the same extent, and that they wouldn’t be subject to different memes growing up in a culture where such activity was the norm.
Says who? Eg, apartheid was found obnoxious by the international community and shut down.
That’s evidence that one country when it does something can get a reaction. That’s very different than a situation like this where it would a) be done by many if not all countries and b) be a much more reasonable course of action.
This requires evidence. In the vast majority of non-universal attitudes, any given person’s attitude is _a_typical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
Because DaFranker has waved away the existence of objections?
I did not wave them away, I created a hypothetical scenario in which some specific set / cluster of objections were “unapplicable” or “already solved” (within the hypothetical).
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
That could well be indicative of atypicallity on your part.
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor
You need to say something, to defend your claim that there are things that coudl be done that are ratitonally desirable, but not intutively good. If there are no examples, your claim fails.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
You say there are a great many: name a few.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge.
They are not just debated, they are accepted in some quarters. However, you were saying that there were other, more radical policies. You offered killing everyone who reaches the age of 80 as an example, and then backpedaled, leaving you with no examples.
atypical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
We are not discucssing an unknown attitude, or an attitude known to be non-majoritarian The majority of peope do not agree with killing old people for being old. I agree too. Iam in the majoity, so my attude is, tautologously, typical.
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
If this comment was made with the implicit intent and understanding of money as an abstraction of the resources we have available, I don’t see why it hasn’t been upvoted through the stratosphere yet.
It really, really hurts me when I see that the best options being offered by even the brightest minds and best visionaries in a given group all revolve around better redistribution of these million dollars, and not one of them asks “What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.
What if we already have created a world of much greater wealth in absolute terms, and it still isn’t benefitting the poorest?
Then we weren’t looking for a solution to this problem statement, or we failed.
The problem statement I wish were posed is: Currently, there is an attribution of (e.g.) medical resources, where wealthier people have priority and every application of medical resources prevents the application of important resources in some other place, medical or otherwise. Can we change this situation around so that the opportunity cost of any given life-changing attribution of (e.g.) medical resources will always be lower than the returns of this attribution (e.g. productivity of the healed person)?
Naturally, this is intended to be a comprehensive “opportunity cost” calculation where “killing off all elders so that the overall medical opportunity cost of healing young persons becomes lower” is an appropriately taxed option. Still an option, perhaps a repugnant one, but at least one that is properly appraised. If there’s currently no known good way to appraise this, then perhaps that might be a good first step?
Are you serious? Why shouldn’t elders get treatment if they’ve paid taxes or insurance all their life? Who’d want to take part in a society knowing they’d be euthenased when the time comes?
Er… Most doctors? (Read this if you don’t know why.)
DaFranker wasn’t offering mercy killing, DaFranker was offering termination when no longer economically viable (Ans possible recycyling into Soylent Green..why let protein go to waste
I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.
You may be engaging in the typical mind fallacy. It may also help to keep in mind that humans will adopt to consider almost anything normal.
How.
Says who? Eg, apartheid was found obnoxious by the international community and shut down.
You take something you’d really dislike and assume that everyone else would also dislike it to close to the same extent, and that they wouldn’t be subject to different memes growing up in a culture where such activity was the norm.
That’s evidence that one country when it does something can get a reaction. That’s very different than a situation like this where it would a) be done by many if not all countries and b) be a much more reasonable course of action.
My attitudes are typical. where’s the fallacy?
As opposed to evidence from no countries.
Why would it be done by all countries? Because DaFranker has waved away the existence of objections?
That could well be indicative of atypicallity on your part.
This requires evidence. In the vast majority of non-universal attitudes, any given person’s attitude is _a_typical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
I did not wave them away, I created a hypothetical scenario in which some specific set / cluster of objections were “unapplicable” or “already solved” (within the hypothetical).
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
Your mom.
There, at least I was overt about mine.
You need to say something, to defend your claim that there are things that coudl be done that are ratitonally desirable, but not intutively good. If there are no examples, your claim fails.
You say there are a great many: name a few.
They are not just debated, they are accepted in some quarters. However, you were saying that there were other, more radical policies. You offered killing everyone who reaches the age of 80 as an example, and then backpedaled, leaving you with no examples.
We are not discucssing an unknown attitude, or an attitude known to be non-majoritarian The majority of peope do not agree with killing old people for being old. I agree too. Iam in the majoity, so my attude is, tautologously, typical.
Better by whose standards?