A combination of the above. We have a core group of donors who can be called in emergency situations, we increase the intensity of blood drives when supplies are low, we reduce marginally-beneficial uses of blood when supplies become low, and we are better able to discard the oldest least-effective blood whenever supplies increase.
We are likely to face challenges in meeting future need. The cohort that most regularly donates blood is aging...
Your donations are not marginally useless! (unless you’ve been pregnant a couple times—in that case, consider stopping).
The reason for the discrepancies in donation rates between types A and B is both simple and complex: ethnicity. In the interests of safety (avoidance of Hepatitis C, HIV, etc) we’ve set up a system that subtly encourages certain types of donors and discourages others. The system is not racist per se, but it is most effective in obtaining donations from white, middle-aged, middle-class males.
Regarding signaling reasons: we are obviously very afraid of blood donated for signaling purposes. Accordingly, we do not allow people to donate to their relatives except under very unusual circumstances. Additionally, we give people an “out” by checking a box which tells the center to draw and discard their blood. That way people who fear they may be high-risk donors can get the social approval of donating without harming any patients.
Essentially this. The A/B/O blood groups represent the most relevant antigens in human blood. There are a host of others (Rh, Duffy, Kell, etc.) which typically create only minor problems in a transfusion and which can be ignored in an emergency. But a person who has been exposed to allogeneic blood via multiple transfusions or pregnancies becomes more likely to develop antibodies to some of these antigens. The donor’s antibodies or white cells can react to the person being transfused, causing lung damage.
I believe you can make an easier calculation: change the denominator from lives to units of blood. How much effort/money/social capital would it take you to convince one more person to donate one more unit? [ignore the cost to that person, as it’s likely zero or slightly beneficial]. Calculate the effort it therefore would take you to replace yourself as a donor while keeping the blood supply constant; this should serve as an upper bound for the self-sacrifice you should make in terms of sexual restraint.
I use “minor” differently than you do, to mean “unlikely to cause death”. Obviously cross-matched blood is always preferable for a variety of reasons (including possible infertility, in the case of young females).
I would avoid RhoGam in the case of a patient who needs a RBC transfusion, incidentally. It would be unlikely to be safe or effective.
This, incidentally, is also an argument for supporting less immediately-efficient charities. If you spend $500 on mosquito nets, you are saving the life of a child whose expected lifetime earning potential is low. This is wonderful, but the rate of “interest” may well be small. If you spend $500 on saving the painting Blue Rigi, you have not saved a single life in the short run. But it contributes to the education of thousands of British children, many of whom will grow up to create and donate large amounts of wealth/knowledge. Your incremental impact on their education may plausibly prevent more malarial deaths than your donation of mosquito nets, though I’ve no idea how to calculate this.
At the very least, I’d suggest that analogy of “setting out on an Arctic journey” sets us up to mentally discount future benefits in favor of immediate results. Instead we might imagine that we’ve set up an Arctic village, or are planning a journey a decade from now. Our spending habits would change accordingly.
“Excess mortality” is a difficult concept. Most estimates I’ve seen calculate excess mortality based on a pre-hostilities baseline because this is relatively easy to calculate and produces the highest possible figure for excess mortality. But the number we really want would compare that mortality to the expected post-war mortality. In the case of Iraq, this would provide a higher expected value than the rate immediately pre-war.
Is this another way of saying that schools should focus on math and science, ignoring art? Or is this an argument that we need to restructure the way public museums work, slashing the cost by replacing the paintings with copies?
Well, I want to make sure I understand it. Which of the following do you mean: a. If British people become more productive that productivity won’t translate into more charity/inventions that will save lives? b. Education does not improve productivity? c. Art museums are not an important part of education (at least not in terms of scientific/economic productivity)? d. Blue Rigi does not improve the overall quality of the Tate? e. Actually none of the above, but Blue Rigi was simply priced too high?
To clarify/address ArisKatsaris’s points:
I am not attempting to make an argument in this post. I am trying to identify the point at which datadataeverywhere first has a problem. For instance, I don’t need to discuss whether the cultural given (fetish?) that our museums will seek out originals is easily mutable if his objection really starts earlier in my list. For instance, is it possible that the education of British children is a better way to save African lives than the immediate purchase of mosquito nets? If that’s implausible, then the question of how one educates a child is irrelevant to this discussion.
It’s particularly interesting because journalism and espionage are being set up as a dichotomy here even though espionage is a subset of journalism.
Maybe. But I still don’t know if that’s because art doesn’t contribute or because originals are the same as facsimiles.
Anyway, can you help me understand what you consider the holes/muddle?
Punishments are supposed to be rehabilitative.
The thinking today has evolved somewhat, away from thinking the pain of childbirth is a punishment. Yet there is still a widespread tendency (including amongst nonreligious people) to claim that a painful childbirth is a natural childbirth, and to overemphasize and invent dangers of epidurals.
What is espionage? “The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of...”
And, what’s a journalist? Someone who publishes information/analysis. Some focus more on information-gathering, and then publish their discoveries. Others focus more on promoting a specific narrative, leaving information-gathering as a secondary concern. But a journalist who happens to obtain or publish information against their nation’s interest is not automatically a spy.
You may choose to count saboteurs and assassins as spies, contrary to the dictionary definition, but consistent with popular usage. If you do, these represent a vanishingly small proportion of the overall number of spies, and are not germane to most discussions of espionage laws (laws against murder, theft, destruction of property, etc are not particularly controversial.)
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
The second most common espionage activity is propaganda—essentially journalism with a bias that is paid for by a foreign power. The audience may again be limited, as in spies dedicated to propagandizing only specific useful targets. But the goal is the transmission of information (false or true) rather than the gathering of information.
What distinguishes espionage from ordinary journalism is that the spy is paid by (or has her loyalty otherwise secured by) a power (nation, corporation, or other conspiracy) that we regard as hostile, and is willing to violate journalistic ethics in support of that employer. Simply limiting the scope of publication does not make one a spy; nor do violations of journalistic ethics; nor does targeted propaganda. It is the motivation that makes one a spy.
If you go to Washington DC, you will find a variety of newsletters with high prices and limited readership on very specialized topics involving impending government regulation. I’ve never heard it claimed that the people researching and publishing such newsletters are not journalists.
Right, so I think you are getting to the crux of the matter: where the money/motivation comes from. The kind of journalist we like gets his money/cred/etc from the audience. If he writes articles that her audience values, he does better. The audience can be broad or narrow, but the important thing is that he’d like to broaden it if she can do so without lowering prices. This model is the most ethical because it puts the audience’s and journalist’s incentives in alignment.
But it’s not the only model. For instance, many journalists get their money/motivation from the message rather than the audience. In the most extreme form, this is advertising/propaganda. Without getting that extreme, a journalist may be attempting as much to get a certain viewpoint out there (Coke is delicious, trade with China is dangerous, whatever) as to benefit her audience. She may well believe what she is saying; this makes such activities more ethical. But yellow or unethical journalism is still journalism.
A specific form of the above is espionage. If you write lots of articles for the NY Times about how important it is to invade Iran, that’s propaganda. If you do so because the Saudi government is paying you to, you’re conducting espionage. The Nazi regime paid a large number of “pacifist” authors in Europe, for instance. It’s the dissemination of information/analysis on behalf of a foreign government, and it is (and was) considered to be espionage just as information-gathering on behalf of a foreign government is espionage.
I am certainly not promoting the prosecution of Assange as a spy, or the prohibition of unethical journalism. My point is that because espionage is a form of journalism, attempts to prevent espionage are always likely to result in the censorship of articles we’d like to see permitted. Likewise, restrictions on propaganda or advertising always ends up inhibiting free speech. We should be weakening rather than strengthening such laws.
I think this is an excellent idea. Members of certain religious traditions do something similar, by having literal charity boxes they keep at home; this allows them to donate at the moment rather than allow the moment to pass. Yours obviously updates the idea: people keep much less of their money in physical form, so the change to chips may be very helpful.
I wanted to comment on “I do worry about doing my good deed for the day and having negative externalities flow from that, but I can’t say I’ve seen it happening yet.” I think this is always a real problem, and I have a few possible suggestions.
When possible, try to donate later in the day rather than earlier. (but of course, you don’t want to let the inspiration pass, so don’t take this too far).
When you do donate earlier, you can then remind yourself of the early donation, and therefore the need to find ways to be helpful to others. Alternatively, lsparrish and you talk about the antifuzzy jar for beer/etc. Perhaps the ties should go both ways; by rewarding yourself explicitly for your good behavior you may potentially see that good deed as “resolved”, and avoid trying to compensate by mistreating others. I don’t have data on that, but it would be interesting to look at (I may try this myself over the next few months).
Make sure the chips only substitute for financial donations. If you let it substitute for helping people with your time/effort, there may be less positive consequences.
There are few utilitarian arguments against cryonics
The cost involved is exorbitant and could be much better spent; as you point out it may also cause disgust reactions in your loved ones instead of promoting closure upon your death.
Or do you mean “against cryonics’ legality”, since happiness is rarely produced by banning wasteful extravagances?
I happen to administer a lot of blood to my patients, so let me answer some of the factual questions.
The way they calculate “up to 3 lives” is in the most trivial way: blood you donate is fractionated into red cells, plasma, and platelets. Each of those may go to a different recipient.
All blood administered to patients comes from voluntary, uncompensated donations. Plasma used in research studies may be compensated, but may not be transfused. This is the most important factor keeping our blood supply safe, and is far more effective than laboratory testing alone.
Given that blood banks need to keep a sufficient store of blood available of each type, rarer blood types are generally in greater need than, say, A After all, a larger proportion of blood of those types must be discarded. O blood is obviously highly useful in trauma situations, and is therefore in high demand as well.
The distribution of donors’ and recipients’ blood types should not be assumed to be equal: people with blood type A are significantly more likely to donate than people with blood type B. This exacerbates the discrepancies due to point 3.
The number of lives saved can be calculated in two ways:
a. the feel-good way. Every time a physician gives a unit of blood to a patient e does so believing it is a life-saving procedure. So if 3 units are given the patient’s life was saved 3 times in rapid succession. (You have to be willing to save a life multiple times, because that’s the analysis we’re using for the rest of this discussion: multiple mosquito nets saved the same kid’s life multiple times over his lifetime; that same kid was then saved by anti-diarrheal treatments; etc. The same analysis belongs here). Now, we subtract the number of patients who die, but that’s a small number. So 26 million transfusions/16 million donations = 1.6 lives saved per donation.
b. the marginal way. Donations are currently sufficient for usage; we benefit in three ways from more donations. First, we can be slightly more profligate with trauma patients who have a low survival chance; this saves a minimal number of lives. Second, fresher blood is associated with better outcomes than older blood; the extent of this effect is unknown but is an area of current research interest. The calculation would have to look at the likelihood that your donation reduced the average shelf age of the blood being administered times the survival improvement from the fresher blood. Third, blood from multiparous women is associated with ARDS; an increase in donation would allow us to stop using it.