George3d6

Karma: 38

George3d6 13 Nov 2023 6:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ariel Simnegar’s comment on: Don’t Donate A Kidney To A Stranger
Well, it’s only the summary of a single section—the post is essentially an introduction to the chapters and then this summary so I think it does a good enough job for 2+ paragraph readers.

George3d6 13 Nov 2023 6:36 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jeberts’s comment on: Don’t Donate A Kidney To A Stranger
That’s about the value of US sales of Ozempic generated in 2022 — a drug that has resulted in such enormous flows of money to its Danish producers that it’s impacting the country’s monetary policy.
Interesting that you’re referring here, as a counterfactual, to a drug that was put on hold for a very long time because weight loss was not a large enough market—only managed to be developed with diabetes as the focus target, and got repurposed for weight loss later.
Also, GLP-1 agonists were a thing for cca 16 years, but the tweaks and research necessary to make them suitable enough for mass-market weight loss only came about in the last 6, and the approval process and scaleup of production took a long time.
Do you believe this would have been faster had weight loss been a 10x bigger market for whatever reasons?

George3d6 13 Nov 2023 6:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MarcusAbramovitch’s comment on: Don’t Donate A Kidney To A Stranger
To quote my other comment:
“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.
My claim is that we shouldn’t be using utilitarian ethics to judge this and instead do the heuristically obvious things, that’s what EA <sometimes> does.
But those heuristics have boundaries which are usually set at harming self and others.
The reason I make this argument is because self-harm is only justified in a very naive utilitarian framework, I believe a mature framework of ethics avoids it in other ways. And I am making this argument primarily for young naive people (like myself) who might not have that fully developed frame of ethics. Some of which might still be utilitarians.
In other words, I would not do the reverse and I don’t think that the “makes the market less efficient” argument stands up to scrutiny in any sensible framework of ethics. But neither does altruistic kidney donation, so I am trying, to the best of my abilities, to showcase the fallacy in the ethical framework with which readers are likely to operate.

George3d6 13 Nov 2023 6:27 UTC
−3 points
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in reply to: MarcusAbramovitch’s comment on: Don’t Donate A Kidney To A Stranger
This argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Is AMF hurting because by distributing bednets and preventing people from getting malaria, you are reducing the incentive to create a malaria vaccine since it would now be less good to create this vaccine.
I would potentially make this argument, I think many people would, but not because AMF is hurting the development of a malaria vaccine.
Most countries /w malaria got rid of it and they did it through other means, I’d leave it as an exercise to you for how AMF distributing malaria nets could prevent that from happening.
However, the important bit with AMF distributing malaria nets is that the cost to the individual is low and not permanent, on the whole most people working on the malaria nets projects probably came out of it better off in terms of their potential to engage with the world.
“Just do good” is an easy heuristic up until it runs against “just kill yourself” at which point I think we should actually do the utility calculation beyond the 1st degree effects, yes.

George3d6 13 Nov 2023 1:16 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: yanni’s comment on: Don’t Donate A Kidney To A Stranger
Summary
Kidneys are important, and having fewer of them leads to a severe downgrade in markers associated with health and quality of life. Donating a kidney results in an over 1300% increase in the risk of kidney disease. A risk-averse interpretation of the data puts the increase in year-to-year mortality after donation upwards of 240%.
While through a certain lens, you can claim kidney donation is not that big a deal, this perception stems mainly from comparing a (very healthy) donor population with your average American or European (prediabetic, overweight, almost never exercises, and classifies fruits as cake decoration as opposed to stand-alone food).
Furthermore, when research evidence is mixed due to the difficulty of the studied area, lack of data, and complete lack of open data, we should fall back to our theories about human physiology, as well as common sense, both of which paint a very bleak picture.
You should not donate a kidney if you aren’t prepared to live the rest of your life with significantly decreased cognitive and physical capacity.
This is probably the most important bit.