Have most of the researchers looking at kidney donation donated a kidney? Have most nephrology researchers donated a kidney? Most surgeons doing kidney transplants? Obviously not, otherwise we’d have more than 200 donations to strangers each year in the US. There are 10,000 board-certified nephrologists, and a few more hundred are added each year, if they took this data seriously they’d all donate.
Heck, on top of those you can add nephrology researchers, the medical statisticians who happen to focus on kidney disease, transplant surgeons, and all well-informed nurses in the nephrology units… thousands of these specialists are created each year. If most of them believed donation to be essentially safe the shortage of kidneys would be half-sovled.
Maybe they are all evil people? They will not take even a marginal risk to save a life.
We usually don’t call people “evil” for not inconveniencing themselves by going through surgery, so you seem to be using this word in a fairly non-standard way here.
Just to elaborate: if I had a condition that could be cured either by having an operation equivalent to a kidney donation or paying $3k, I would almost certainly pay $3k. However, I could likely save a statistical life by donating this $3k to an effective charity. So my not donating my kidney to a stranger provides no more evidence of my evil nature than my not donating $3k to save the life of a random stranger, because I price the inconvenience of the surgery at more than $3k even if the surgery has no long-run consequences for my health.
I don’t think it’s a matter of poetic license. You’re making an empirical claim that if specialists actually believed kidney donation had no long-term side effects, they would be lining up to donate their kidneys and we would see a much higher rate of kidney donations in the US. I think this claim is wrong because the inconvenience of surgery is substantial enough to block people from donating their kidneys even in the absence of long-term side effects.
The use of the word “evil” sneaks in an assumption that most people would be happy to make this tradeoff to improve a stranger’s life at the cost of some inconvenience to themselves, but I think this claim is actually false. So the fact that this doesn’t happen gives very little evidence that specialists don’t take claims about the small long-term health effects of kidney donation seriously.
Do people actually disapprove of and disagree with this comment, or do they disapprove of the use of said ‘poetic’ language in the post? If the latter, perhaps they should downvote the post and upvote the comment for honesty.
Perhaps there should be a react for “I disapprove of the information this comment revealed, but I’m glad it admitted it”.
As I said, I think it’s not just that the language is poetic. There is an implicit inference that goes like
People who would not voluntarily undergo surgery without long-term adverse effects on their health to improve the life of a stranger are evil.
Most researchers who would be in a position to know the state of the evidence on the long-term adverse health effects of kidney donation don’t personally donate one of their kidneys.
Most researchers are unlikely to be evil.
So it’s unlikely that most researchers believe kidney donation has no long-term adverse health effects.
I’m saying that there is no definition of the word “evil” that makes statements (1) and (3) simultaneously true. Either you adopt a narrow definition, in which case (3) is true but (1) is false; or you adopt a broad definition, in which case (1) is true but (3) is false.
This is not a point about stylistic choices, it’s undermining one of the key arguments the post offers for its position. The post is significantly stronger if it can persuade us that even established experts in the field agree with the author and the hypothesis being advanced is in some sense “mainstream”, even if it’s implicitly held.
We usually don’t call people “evil” for not inconveniencing themselves by going through surgery, so you seem to be using this word in a fairly non-standard way here.
Just to elaborate: if I had a condition that could be cured either by having an operation equivalent to a kidney donation or paying $3k, I would almost certainly pay $3k. However, I could likely save a statistical life by donating this $3k to an effective charity. So my not donating my kidney to a stranger provides no more evidence of my evil nature than my not donating $3k to save the life of a random stranger, because I price the inconvenience of the surgery at more than $3k even if the surgery has no long-run consequences for my health.
Yes, that was poetic license to drive the point, it is not the framing I’d used if this was a conceptual analysis paper.
I don’t think it’s a matter of poetic license. You’re making an empirical claim that if specialists actually believed kidney donation had no long-term side effects, they would be lining up to donate their kidneys and we would see a much higher rate of kidney donations in the US. I think this claim is wrong because the inconvenience of surgery is substantial enough to block people from donating their kidneys even in the absence of long-term side effects.
The use of the word “evil” sneaks in an assumption that most people would be happy to make this tradeoff to improve a stranger’s life at the cost of some inconvenience to themselves, but I think this claim is actually false. So the fact that this doesn’t happen gives very little evidence that specialists don’t take claims about the small long-term health effects of kidney donation seriously.
Do people actually disapprove of and disagree with this comment, or do they disapprove of the use of said ‘poetic’ language in the post? If the latter, perhaps they should downvote the post and upvote the comment for honesty.
Perhaps there should be a react for “I disapprove of the information this comment revealed, but I’m glad it admitted it”.
As I said, I think it’s not just that the language is poetic. There is an implicit inference that goes like
People who would not voluntarily undergo surgery without long-term adverse effects on their health to improve the life of a stranger are evil.
Most researchers who would be in a position to know the state of the evidence on the long-term adverse health effects of kidney donation don’t personally donate one of their kidneys.
Most researchers are unlikely to be evil.
So it’s unlikely that most researchers believe kidney donation has no long-term adverse health effects.
I’m saying that there is no definition of the word “evil” that makes statements (1) and (3) simultaneously true. Either you adopt a narrow definition, in which case (3) is true but (1) is false; or you adopt a broad definition, in which case (1) is true but (3) is false.
This is not a point about stylistic choices, it’s undermining one of the key arguments the post offers for its position. The post is significantly stronger if it can persuade us that even established experts in the field agree with the author and the hypothesis being advanced is in some sense “mainstream”, even if it’s implicitly held.