Second order effects rarely overrule first order effects
This is the type of argument that I expect from tall poppy syndrome afflicted Twitter users, not LessWrong.
This is a strewn about claim you can’t possibly justify.
Sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t, hence why I provide the example of artificial blood (both obviously doable with current tech and non-existent), it is the closest one I could find.
I’m of course not claiming this is a guarantee for kidney donation, but it is a possibility, and it’s a possibility in which donation is destroying a lot of QALY compared to what it’s saving. My point is not that it’s certainly morally wrong, but that it isn’t certainly morally right.
This argument proves too much. A lot of people die of HIV, and more money would be spent curing it if more people had it. Therefore, it’s a moral imperative to infect as many people with HIV as possible.
I think this is similar to the broken window economic argument because you’re saying we should make something worse to redirect resources, but you’re ignoring the value of the resources’ current use. Ignoring the fact that there’s already enough people dying of kidney disease to create a huge market, the money society doesn’t spend on kidney disease is being used for other things that people value more. Creating an emergency to force those resources to be used differently is bad.
(I still upvoted this post for the section on risks)
There is no efficient market of moral intervention. If fatal kidney disease doubled gradually over the next ten years, society would not double its efforts to artificially produce kidneys in response. We live in a sad unfortunate world where the connection between “size of ${problem}” and “resources spent solving ${problem}” is very weak. And even if we did live in such a world artificially inflating problems in order to get more funding allocated to them would be net-negative.
This is the type of argument that I expect from tall poppy syndrome afflicted Twitter users, not LessWrong.
This is a strewn about claim you can’t possibly justify.
Sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t, hence why I provide the example of artificial blood (both obviously doable with current tech and non-existent), it is the closest one I could find.
I’m of course not claiming this is a guarantee for kidney donation, but it is a possibility, and it’s a possibility in which donation is destroying a lot of QALY compared to what it’s saving. My point is not that it’s certainly morally wrong, but that it isn’t certainly morally right.
This argument proves too much. A lot of people die of HIV, and more money would be spent curing it if more people had it. Therefore, it’s a moral imperative to infect as many people with HIV as possible.
I think this is similar to the broken window economic argument because you’re saying we should make something worse to redirect resources, but you’re ignoring the value of the resources’ current use. Ignoring the fact that there’s already enough people dying of kidney disease to create a huge market, the money society doesn’t spend on kidney disease is being used for other things that people value more. Creating an emergency to force those resources to be used differently is bad.
(I still upvoted this post for the section on risks)
There is no efficient market of moral intervention. If fatal kidney disease doubled gradually over the next ten years, society would not double its efforts to artificially produce kidneys in response. We live in a sad unfortunate world where the connection between “size of ${problem}” and “resources spent solving ${problem}” is very weak. And even if we did live in such a world artificially inflating problems in order to get more funding allocated to them would be net-negative.