I noticed there is certain comic effect to immediately matter-of-factly agreeing with arguments on the side of your opponent’s position that are correct, but were picked as debate-soldiers, expected to be fought or in some way excused/objected to. :-)
I had enormous dirty fun with this while on holiday. I got talking to a very smart (ex-LLNL nuclear engineer) ninety-year-old who was also very right wing. He proposed to me that the Government should harvest the organs of homeless people in order to give them to combat veterans. What he wanted me to say, of course, was that this proposal was outrageous and wrong, that human life was of greater value than that, and so on, so he could then say that these people were a drain on society and the people who’d made such sacrifices were more important, and so on.
Instead I said “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy the organs from people in the third world? If you wanted to capture homeless people and take their organs, you’d need some sort of legal procedure to decide who was eligible, and there’d be appeals and so on, and it would all cost about as much as sentencing someone to death in the USA does now, which I’d guess must be hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. There must be plenty of people in poorer countries who would sacrifice their lives for a fraction of that money to feed their families in perpituity. There would be no use of force, no mistaken killings, and their organs would be higher quality. I’m not aware of a problem with getting organs for veterans, but if there is, that seems like a more efficient way to solve it.”
His response? He went and got his CV so I’d be impressed at what a smart fellow he was!
You may be able to get an even better kidney-for-the-buck ratio (and increased moral outrage) with a lottery system: get $5.000 for a one-in-ten chance of losing a kidney; or $50.000 for a one-in-ten chance of being killed and having all your organs harvested.
That would be like signing up for a particularly high-risk job, like soldier.
The optimal system would probably be one where ten victi, uh, candidates around the world are simultaneously given a sleeping pill, attached to a machine with a breathing tube, and once they are a sleep a central server under high scrutiny randomly triggers death on one of the machines; upon waking up, the survivors are given their money.
I was actually planning a ‘However, ’ in that comment but I will leave it as it is now. However, I do think that it is more common not to (openly) change one’s opinion—especially for people in power.
The rule-proving exception in the famous quote, attributed to Keyes:
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
(and I forgive him the colloquial use of the word ‘fact’...)
I noticed there is certain comic effect to immediately matter-of-factly agreeing with arguments on the side of your opponent’s position that are correct, but were picked as debate-soldiers, expected to be fought or in some way excused/objected to. :-)
I had enormous dirty fun with this while on holiday. I got talking to a very smart (ex-LLNL nuclear engineer) ninety-year-old who was also very right wing. He proposed to me that the Government should harvest the organs of homeless people in order to give them to combat veterans. What he wanted me to say, of course, was that this proposal was outrageous and wrong, that human life was of greater value than that, and so on, so he could then say that these people were a drain on society and the people who’d made such sacrifices were more important, and so on.
Instead I said “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy the organs from people in the third world? If you wanted to capture homeless people and take their organs, you’d need some sort of legal procedure to decide who was eligible, and there’d be appeals and so on, and it would all cost about as much as sentencing someone to death in the USA does now, which I’d guess must be hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. There must be plenty of people in poorer countries who would sacrifice their lives for a fraction of that money to feed their families in perpituity. There would be no use of force, no mistaken killings, and their organs would be higher quality. I’m not aware of a problem with getting organs for veterans, but if there is, that seems like a more efficient way to solve it.”
His response? He went and got his CV so I’d be impressed at what a smart fellow he was!
You may be able to get an even better kidney-for-the-buck ratio (and increased moral outrage) with a lottery system: get $5.000 for a one-in-ten chance of losing a kidney; or $50.000 for a one-in-ten chance of being killed and having all your organs harvested.
That would be like signing up for a particularly high-risk job, like soldier.
To ensure people don’t defect when they discover they’ve lost the lottery, you’d have to play lethal injection Russian Roulette.
The optimal system would probably be one where ten victi, uh, candidates around the world are simultaneously given a sleeping pill, attached to a machine with a breathing tube, and once they are a sleep a central server under high scrutiny randomly triggers death on one of the machines; upon waking up, the survivors are given their money.
OK, I think this thread is creepy enough now.
Only on LW one can get comments like that :-)
I was actually planning a ‘However, ’ in that comment but I will leave it as it is now. However, I do think that it is more common not to (openly) change one’s opinion—especially for people in power.
The rule-proving exception in the famous quote, attributed to Keyes:
(and I forgive him the colloquial use of the word ‘fact’...)