The way you formulated a question is not conducive to getting the answers you want, because people start thinking of something along the lines of the Holocaust, 9/11, or other memes associated with evil.
I recommend rephrasing it as follows: point out the most anti-altruistic legal ways a person or an organization have spent $1M. Thinking about it this way, there is no shortage of examples, none resulting in Kawoomba losing much sleep. In fact, a large chunk of what most governments do is both legal and anti-altruistic.
For example, suppressing one’s right to die with dignity, and thus forcing doctors and nurses to torture thousands of helpless and elderly people against their will, often for years, before they are allowed to finally die, is arguably legal, anti-altruistic and doesn’t cost a lot to perpetuate. The resulting disutility by most measures outweighs 9/11 by many orders of magnitude.
Another example: resisting self-driving car adoption. This one is even worse, given that every year self-driving cars are delayed, costs about 30,000 lives in the US only.
Just look around you, money is spent in anti-altruistic ways all the time.
I think this is reasonable. I think my “not illegal” requirement should be stopping the really nefarious proposals, but evidently people here are darker than I thought (or think they are).
On the other hand, it makes it more concrete and takes on a more realistic issue of what ways people actuall spend their money are most harmful.
But remember, this is about marginal impact. 1 million to an anti-euthanasia group probably doesn’t really affect policy a lot. And we haven’t really even seen self-driving cars being resisted in earnest (they aren’t near ready for prime-time yet, and their benefits are largely dependent on a large fraction of drivers adopting them).
For example, suppressing one’s right to die with dignity,
Given that advocating the right to “die with dignity” tends to have as a side effect people who are disabled (or would just be expensive to treat) being killed against their will, it is not clear that this is in fact negative. If anything I would argue that giving the money to euthanasia advocates will result in a much more negative outcome.
Given that advocating the right to “die with dignity” tends to have as a side effect people who are disabled (or would just be expensive to treat) being killed against their will, it is not clear that this is in fact negative.
You assert that it “tends” to have this effect. On what evidence?
If this were the case, we might expect to see people who feared this happening to them to be migrating out of places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.
If the opposite were the case, we might expect to see people who feared being kept alive in a state of torment to be migrating to places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.
Which do we see?
If assisted suicide enabled the killing of inconvenient terminal patients at the convenience of their doctors, relatives, or insurers, we might expect a relatively high number of terminal patients to “choose” assisted suicide. If it did not so, we might expect a relatively low rate. For this, we might specifically look in places where assisted suicide has been legal for many years, such as the Netherlands.
Table 1 further shows that the frequency of ending of life without an explicit patient request decreased from 0.8% of all deaths in 1990 to 0.4% in 2005 (approximately 550 cases annually). Further analyses of the cases of ending of life without an explicit request show that these concern nearly always patients who are very close to death, are incompetent but with whom the hastening of death has been discussed earlier in the disease trajectory and/or with their relatives, and for whom opioids were used to end life
The number of patients killed without consent was cut in half after euthanasia was legalized, and these deaths continue to be overwhelmingly done with reasonable justification.
The way you formulated a question is not conducive to getting the answers you want, because people start thinking of something along the lines of the Holocaust, 9/11, or other memes associated with evil.
I recommend rephrasing it as follows: point out the most anti-altruistic legal ways a person or an organization have spent $1M. Thinking about it this way, there is no shortage of examples, none resulting in Kawoomba losing much sleep. In fact, a large chunk of what most governments do is both legal and anti-altruistic.
For example, suppressing one’s right to die with dignity, and thus forcing doctors and nurses to torture thousands of helpless and elderly people against their will, often for years, before they are allowed to finally die, is arguably legal, anti-altruistic and doesn’t cost a lot to perpetuate. The resulting disutility by most measures outweighs 9/11 by many orders of magnitude.
Another example: resisting self-driving car adoption. This one is even worse, given that every year self-driving cars are delayed, costs about 30,000 lives in the US only.
Just look around you, money is spent in anti-altruistic ways all the time.
I think this is reasonable. I think my “not illegal” requirement should be stopping the really nefarious proposals, but evidently people here are darker than I thought (or think they are).
On the other hand, it makes it more concrete and takes on a more realistic issue of what ways people actuall spend their money are most harmful.
But remember, this is about marginal impact. 1 million to an anti-euthanasia group probably doesn’t really affect policy a lot. And we haven’t really even seen self-driving cars being resisted in earnest (they aren’t near ready for prime-time yet, and their benefits are largely dependent on a large fraction of drivers adopting them).
Those are only examples, but
It can certainly tip the balance for a given state legislation or a ballot, such as the one in Maine.
Lobbying to shift funding away from NHTSA would be invisible.
Given that advocating the right to “die with dignity” tends to have as a side effect people who are disabled (or would just be expensive to treat) being killed against their will, it is not clear that this is in fact negative. If anything I would argue that giving the money to euthanasia advocates will result in a much more negative outcome.
It’s not obvious that widespread adoption of self-driving cars is such a good idea.
You assert that it “tends” to have this effect. On what evidence?
If this were the case, we might expect to see people who feared this happening to them to be migrating out of places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.
If the opposite were the case, we might expect to see people who feared being kept alive in a state of torment to be migrating to places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.
Which do we see?
If assisted suicide enabled the killing of inconvenient terminal patients at the convenience of their doctors, relatives, or insurers, we might expect a relatively high number of terminal patients to “choose” assisted suicide. If it did not so, we might expect a relatively low rate. For this, we might specifically look in places where assisted suicide has been legal for many years, such as the Netherlands.
Which do we see?
From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/29/fake-euthanasia-statistics/