Some amazing things are going on, not all of which involve mRNA, although please please those of you with the ability to do so, do your part to ensure that stays funded, either via investment or grants.
Adding my voice to the “Tirzepatide works incredibly well for me” camp. I plan to basically stay on ~5 mg for the rest of my life (barring a new generation that’s a clear upgrade). I love the person I am on Tirzepatide so much more.
Man, even if weird AI stuff doesn’t happen, it’s gonna be so weird when I’m 50 and a bunch of 8 foot tall Greek gods are riding resurrected wholly mammoths around
This basically ruins sports right? You can’t realistically compete with the guy who has twice as much muscle due to gene edits.
Not to say that it’s not totally overwhelmingly worth it, but watching a game of basketball in the future will look very odd
We already have gene-segregated sports: Men's and Women's events. I don't imagine it would be that difficult to have a separate league for "non-GMO" athletes if there's sufficient demand for it.
Male vs. female is a significantly easier to verify distinction than genetically modified vs. non-genetically modified, and that already comes with enough edge cases that it's a reliable controversy at every major sporting event.
Is embryo selection genetic modification? Single modifications for well-defined genetic diseases? Selective breeding (yes, really)? Kids of anyone with germline genetic modifications will also be modified, so you'll have endless controversies over athletes being accused of faking their heritage. Of course, none of that will prevent a separate league in principle, as you said, we already have men's and women's events, and events for disabled athletes. The real obstacle would be that after genetic modification becomes normalized, there won't be much public interest in what human baseline performance used to be.
I lost weight on a GLP-1 and I recently got a DEXA scan. My bone mass and muscle mass are both above average for my age and sex. (They were both above average for my age and sex before I lost weight, too.) I did make a big effort to do resistance training, which I find very unpleasant, and eat plenty of protein. I didn't go nuts with either of those, though. I still want to see studies that compare the loss of bone and muscle in people who lost weight through will power and people who lost weight through GLP-1 agonists. That's the only comparison that matters.
>That if we allow people to lose weight without willpower or personal virtue then that will make the signals harder to read and be Just Awful?
I think it'd be a net win just on aesthetics alone; it's deeply depressing seeing so many deeply sick people in public. Especially at the grocery store, where I know a bunch of the crap we sell is making the problem worse rather than better. Not having that bit of Copenhagen guilt would be a weight (heh) off my conscience. Nevermind the secondary knock-on effects of the mass of humanity simply taking up less space per capita. Density and infill, ho! One would like to think design trends would end up a bit more like those lovely Japanese appliances: small and efficient for compact living spaces, instead of the usual American trend of bigger things for ever-bigger people. People are pretty creative anyway, the narcissism of small differences will find some new way to signal Actually Genetically Fit once everyone is thin as a CLAMP anime character.
Sugar chart is weird. Not sure if it's a More Dakka problem (the base rate is, uh, pretty high) or just that it's a hard ingredient to escape, once one bothers to look. I never really got over learning years ago that a store-bought beef and broccoli has roughly a Coca-Cola worth of sugar. It's like...why? Same thing as corn syrup in sushi...the American palette still being inbalanced towards sweet ruins so many foods that could otherwise be great. Like 90% of bread, sigh. Maybe if heart disease gets fixed we can go back to using salt instead, the original zero calorie flavour mineral.
Still waiting for high-quality fake sweeteners that don't trip up the genetic thing where they taste like shit. Natural alternatives like monkfruit extract or stevia mostly do the trick, but are expensive by comparison...nothing's ever "really" quite like actual sugar though. To the extent I bother to eat sweets at all, may as well make sure it's The Real Deal. Life's too short to waste on eating premium mediocre (honestly less premium and more mediocre) desserts. Same with alcohol, if you're gonna do it, at least drink the top-shelf stuff...
We found out due to my wife's gestational diabetes that the tastier store brand hummus from the local options had a lot of sugar. I still buy it usually though, because, uh, it's the tastier one.
Living abroad for a while last year, I lost 15 pounds just from eating less sugar. Since returning to the US, I've regained about 10 pounds. I attribute success at keeping off the remaining 5 to not buying anything with corn syrup in it. Not because corn syrup is massively worse for you than sugar, but because of subsidies, companies put way more of it than necessary in everything. Real sugar is a premium ingredient by comparison, so it's used more sparingly.
Re embryo selection: do people who have multiple kids via IVF do an IVF round per child, or do you do all your IVF rounds upfront and then just stick a new frozen egg every time
From what my friends did (thankfully we did not have to go IVF route) it's less what you want to harvest, and more what you can harvest. The older you get the less viable eggs you'll get per round of (expensive) harvesting. If you're 35 you might get 8, whereas maybe you'd get 25 at 25.
Curious if you've ever written elsewhere about what the experience of perpetual hunger is like? Besides the short post on adopting modified TDT, which was neat, but that's more about the solution rather than the problem. One of my weak areas is not being able to sleep while above some low hunger threshold, but of course digestion itself also delays sleep...it's much easier to handle hunger while awake. Which seems weird, since that's when actual energy expenditure is expected?
I grew up reading Dilbert, with two Dilbert-loving parents (I think they still have a PHB doll lying around somewhere), and was very sad about the...I guess let's call it turn towards Catbert apologia. We ask for so little in life, and boy do we get it. So that news still makes me feel bad; any turn towards the light should be rewarded, but yeah, probably ngmi. At least Bill Watterson is still with us. Can't have all my favourite childhood cartoonists kicking the bucket.
For me the "perpetual hunger feeling" went away after... ~12 months of fairly strict dieting. The only food that can still tempt me to overeat is ice cream, so I don't buy it, otherwise I have a full fridge and stick to the schedule without any mental effort.
Thanks for sharing. So It Gets Better, huh? Knowing that there is an actual step change at the end of the tunnel increases my resolve. It's a lot easier to put up with suffering knowing that it'll (eventually) pay off, rather than be this perpetual cycle of guilt and mortification that one dreads as bedtime approaches.
And yeah fruit's amazing, literally Nature's Candy(tm) since I ~don't eat sweets in general. Gimme a big bowl of watermelon or some nice apricots instead. Way less punitive way to get decent fibre versus crucifer crucification too. I just wish it cost a bit less; there's very little satiety factor (I absolutely will eat several pounds of blueberries in one sitting if available) and quality gets real iffy once one starts buying in bulk sizes. >tfw buy a bag of apples and only a couple are genuinely really good but you'd feel like an ass for returning the rest...
Re: hunger at night, I think it's just much easier to be distracted during the day through various forms of stimulation vs lying in bed (especially if not a reader/TV watcher)
That...actually makes a lot of sense? Hunger's edge does tend to sharpen the mind towards a singular driving focus (h/t Jack Dorsey), but that is complely the wrong mental state one wants for falling asleep.
I wish reading worked reliably for me. Sometimes if the material is dreadfully boring, that's good enough to pass out without consciously intending to do so...of course that tends to funge against doing such activities for leisure, which is half the point. Good writing energizes rather than enervates. Tired: A List Of Lethalities (sorry Eliezer). Wired: DWATV roundups.
Ha! Aye, reading can go either way for me, depends how interesting the content is. DWATV is definitely full thinking-mode material.
Aside from that, I'm fortunate that I can completely rip up the sleep rulebook. Sleep best right after a large meal. Can have a coffee and fall asleep 20 mins later. Screens all night, fall asleep while blasting my eyes with a phone screen 6 inches away...
Regarding the keto diet, my impression is that the vast majority of people who would say they are "eating keto" are not actually in ketosis and probably not even all that low carb. Products are frequently labeled "keto friendly" despite having 20% or more calories from carbohydrates, and nobody seems to understand that dietary protein can prevent ketosis. Actually getting into ketosis is quite hard, and not particularly healthy, which is why keto is for the most part correctly described as a fad diet, much the same way as the gluten free diet was a fad diet a decade or so ago, despite being very helpful for people with certain medical conditions.
I briefly tried keto many years ago when I was a bodybuilder (and much more naive on dietetics), agree on difficulty - very easy to consume a few dozen g of carbs one way or the other and prevent it. And pointless unless for medical reasons.
People trying keto, but buying all the fake versions of food, are just setting themselves up for failure. It's sad + expensive. 25g-40g of total carbs per day isn't too hard to hit, so long as you don't eat any processed carbs, and your veg intake is limited to leafy greens (not cabbage), broccoli, green beans, celery, bell peppers, mushrooms and asparagus.
Personally I draw the line at riced cauliflower, anything more processed is too processed, and it should be deployed in moderation.
When I was more into lifting and keto (you know, pre kids when I had 2 hours to lift 5 days a week) I'd eat a keto cookie (quest iirc) and Greekacino (very strong coffee with milk from a goat) 45 minutes before big gym sessions. It was effective, but of course the day your big session turns into a medium session you're screwed.
My late mother died prematurely due to the medical team nurses injecting her lower spine with a death-hastening drug cocktail on Friday evening, April 12, 2024. I was at the foot of her hospital bed, and when the nurses rolled he over on her side, she shrieked out to me repeatedly in terror, "They're killing me." I had previously struggled with PTSD, but OMG, this was exponentially worse than any experience that had come before for either of us. We were hoodwinked into the horrific timing of this outcome. She writhed in her bed for the initial 45 minutes afterward, during which time I was repeatedly unable to get anyone on the floor to see about her. She was then pronounced dead some 7-8 hours later. I stayed with her the whole time, comforting her the best I was able, while struggling not to crumple and pass out in my serious trauma and grief. All of this has and will haunt me until my last breath. I've been told several times that everything unfolded lawfully and ethically, but I'm unsatisfied. While I want to and will remain a modern, logical, and lawful person, there's nonetheless a darker part of me that would summon the Norns, which I don't believe in whatsoever, if I could, to exact a steep revenge.
That experience sounds unbearable! Was that a treatment she had previously agreed to, not having been properly informed first? I don't quite understand.
Quibble about blindness: if you give each blind person the equivalent of a few million dollars, would that still be a disadvantage on net? Is there no amount of money or resources that can compensate for blindness? I'm not claiming there definitely is, but I think this is the framework that those bioethicists are operating from & reasonable minds can disagree.
Set up a fund to blind and compensate bioethicists based on how much money they believe is the socially required amount. You'll figure out quick what that number is.
probably negligible - my read is that they're so wedded to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics that they're opposed to society doing anything at all proactive. mass murder is not OK, but mass death due to negligence is OK.
"it is counterproductive and wrong to strike back by saying that since it condemns your children to be worse off that not using selection is unethical."
I can see how it might be counterproductive, but I fail to see how it's *wrong.* It seems obviously correct. "Sorry Jimmy, your parents had religious convictions preventing them from engineering you to be smart and healthy, so you're dumb and crippled. Sucks to be you but something something can't impose moral obligations on prospective parents for the welfare of their children because reasons."
Well, Jimmy would never have been smart and healthy. He would be dead and you would be talking to one of his siblings instead. Perhaps you can see that, even if you don't agree on the object level, "forcing parents to [as they see it] murder their own children" might be wrong. We have conscientious objector laws precisely because we think it is generally bad to force people to do what they consider murder, even when we don't see it the same way.
The "Ozempic's impact on pensions" Reuters article screenshot from the Peter Wildeford X account is fake. I couldn't find any trace of it online except in quote from some random Facebook page.
Some of the insane views of bioethicists seem more explicable in light of the situation with MAID. Object-level the question about whose life to save has an obvious right answer.
But someone who has been trained to constantly think about the history of medical abuses, and who looks at continual efforts to expand the scope of MAID, might read it as "who can we get away with killing?" which may explain the answer of the 63%. Sort of a refusal to cooperate.
Not a defense of the consensus views of the bioethics field. Just an attempt to make sense of what may motivate those views.
I think that's only the obvious right answer if you value 'years of live saved' above 'suffering minimised', the inverse resulting in the 10 year old being the right answer, due to the combination of very high unlived life remaining combined with almost adult-level comprehension of death and capacity to suffer deeply prior to it.
Certainly - we're programmed for that, particularly so as humans due to the comparatively immense resource and time involved in gestation and childrearing and overwhelmingly birthing only one child at a time. But that's genetic survival-driven emotional wiring produced by evolution and doesn't neccessarily neatly map to the answers to ethics questions.
> That was how the process went in 2020, and at that time, the subcommittee of researchers dedicated to alcohol (including Naimi) advised the government to reduce the recommended limit down to one drink per day for men, from two. The Trump administration ultimately decided not to follow the recommendation.
I'd bet most Americans have heard that Trump's #1 rule for himself and his kids was always "No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes," without any evidence or even rumors that Trump is secretly a drinker. Nobody cares about some random "buried" scientific report or what the "official" recommended number of drinks is, but a simple "3 No's" message that Trump follows religiously is extremely powerful. Biden didn't drink either, but you can find tons of photos of him pouring or gifting alcohol to others - e.g., "Biden delivers beer to Shanksville firefighters: ‘I keep my promises’" or "‘Get a shot and have a beer’: Biden touts free brew to boost vaccines."
Quite frankly, I struggle to imagine a person cutting his drinking in half because the FDA announced a new recommendation, but I can easily imagine people second-guessing their drink after hearing Trump repeat the 3 No's somewhere.
Unsavory comments from ex-politicians aside, I don't see anything remotely alarming about 5% of deaths in Canada being from MAID. 25% of Canadians die of cancer[1], so we can approximate the % of deaths that are painful and foreseeable as at least 25%. Given this, it seems reasonable to me that a large % of deaths would be attributable to MAID in a well-run society, and as society improves (fewer accidents and preventable deaths, more accurate prognoses) the percent of deaths attributable to MAID should approach 100% (minus people with religious objections, and until we figure out immortality).
Yes, I find having the option extremely comforting. I do not intend to spend the last weeks or month of my life in excruciating, semi-lucid pain, and I would rather not have to sneak off to shoot myself behind the shed.
The circumstances around my mom's last week of life are complicated, and this is not the forum for detailed review and analysis. Everything that could go wrong over the course of Mom's last week seemed to, at the time and in hindsight. Broadly speaking, ethical concerns for hunted game, slaughtered farm animals, euthanized pets, assisted suicide, etc, as I understand it, are to reduce or nearly eliminate fear and pain. This important difference in approach distinguishes aspirationally humane. Setting the legalities aside for this snippet of a response, there was no medically necessary point to the suffering both my mom and I experienced at and after the injection of a death-hastening drug cocktail into my mother's lower spine, which had been described euphemistically to me consistently and vaguely, and I feel disingenuously beforehand as pain medication. This is my condensed good-faith effort to respond to, "But I don't quite understand."
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/medical-roundup-5
Adding my voice to the “Tirzepatide works incredibly well for me” camp. I plan to basically stay on ~5 mg for the rest of my life (barring a new generation that’s a clear upgrade). I love the person I am on Tirzepatide so much more.
Man, even if weird AI stuff doesn’t happen, it’s gonna be so weird when I’m 50 and a bunch of 8 foot tall Greek gods are riding resurrected wholly mammoths around
This basically ruins sports right? You can’t realistically compete with the guy who has twice as much muscle due to gene edits.
Not to say that it’s not totally overwhelmingly worth it, but watching a game of basketball in the future will look very odd
We already have gene-segregated sports: Men's and Women's events. I don't imagine it would be that difficult to have a separate league for "non-GMO" athletes if there's sufficient demand for it.
That's going to be a mess.
Male vs. female is a significantly easier to verify distinction than genetically modified vs. non-genetically modified, and that already comes with enough edge cases that it's a reliable controversy at every major sporting event.
Is embryo selection genetic modification? Single modifications for well-defined genetic diseases? Selective breeding (yes, really)? Kids of anyone with germline genetic modifications will also be modified, so you'll have endless controversies over athletes being accused of faking their heritage. Of course, none of that will prevent a separate league in principle, as you said, we already have men's and women's events, and events for disabled athletes. The real obstacle would be that after genetic modification becomes normalized, there won't be much public interest in what human baseline performance used to be.
I lost weight on a GLP-1 and I recently got a DEXA scan. My bone mass and muscle mass are both above average for my age and sex. (They were both above average for my age and sex before I lost weight, too.) I did make a big effort to do resistance training, which I find very unpleasant, and eat plenty of protein. I didn't go nuts with either of those, though. I still want to see studies that compare the loss of bone and muscle in people who lost weight through will power and people who lost weight through GLP-1 agonists. That's the only comparison that matters.
>That if we allow people to lose weight without willpower or personal virtue then that will make the signals harder to read and be Just Awful?
I think it'd be a net win just on aesthetics alone; it's deeply depressing seeing so many deeply sick people in public. Especially at the grocery store, where I know a bunch of the crap we sell is making the problem worse rather than better. Not having that bit of Copenhagen guilt would be a weight (heh) off my conscience. Nevermind the secondary knock-on effects of the mass of humanity simply taking up less space per capita. Density and infill, ho! One would like to think design trends would end up a bit more like those lovely Japanese appliances: small and efficient for compact living spaces, instead of the usual American trend of bigger things for ever-bigger people. People are pretty creative anyway, the narcissism of small differences will find some new way to signal Actually Genetically Fit once everyone is thin as a CLAMP anime character.
Sugar chart is weird. Not sure if it's a More Dakka problem (the base rate is, uh, pretty high) or just that it's a hard ingredient to escape, once one bothers to look. I never really got over learning years ago that a store-bought beef and broccoli has roughly a Coca-Cola worth of sugar. It's like...why? Same thing as corn syrup in sushi...the American palette still being inbalanced towards sweet ruins so many foods that could otherwise be great. Like 90% of bread, sigh. Maybe if heart disease gets fixed we can go back to using salt instead, the original zero calorie flavour mineral.
Still waiting for high-quality fake sweeteners that don't trip up the genetic thing where they taste like shit. Natural alternatives like monkfruit extract or stevia mostly do the trick, but are expensive by comparison...nothing's ever "really" quite like actual sugar though. To the extent I bother to eat sweets at all, may as well make sure it's The Real Deal. Life's too short to waste on eating premium mediocre (honestly less premium and more mediocre) desserts. Same with alcohol, if you're gonna do it, at least drink the top-shelf stuff...
We found out due to my wife's gestational diabetes that the tastier store brand hummus from the local options had a lot of sugar. I still buy it usually though, because, uh, it's the tastier one.
Living abroad for a while last year, I lost 15 pounds just from eating less sugar. Since returning to the US, I've regained about 10 pounds. I attribute success at keeping off the remaining 5 to not buying anything with corn syrup in it. Not because corn syrup is massively worse for you than sugar, but because of subsidies, companies put way more of it than necessary in everything. Real sugar is a premium ingredient by comparison, so it's used more sparingly.
Re embryo selection: do people who have multiple kids via IVF do an IVF round per child, or do you do all your IVF rounds upfront and then just stick a new frozen egg every time
From what my friends did (thankfully we did not have to go IVF route) it's less what you want to harvest, and more what you can harvest. The older you get the less viable eggs you'll get per round of (expensive) harvesting. If you're 35 you might get 8, whereas maybe you'd get 25 at 25.
Curious if you've ever written elsewhere about what the experience of perpetual hunger is like? Besides the short post on adopting modified TDT, which was neat, but that's more about the solution rather than the problem. One of my weak areas is not being able to sleep while above some low hunger threshold, but of course digestion itself also delays sleep...it's much easier to handle hunger while awake. Which seems weird, since that's when actual energy expenditure is expected?
I grew up reading Dilbert, with two Dilbert-loving parents (I think they still have a PHB doll lying around somewhere), and was very sad about the...I guess let's call it turn towards Catbert apologia. We ask for so little in life, and boy do we get it. So that news still makes me feel bad; any turn towards the light should be rewarded, but yeah, probably ngmi. At least Bill Watterson is still with us. Can't have all my favourite childhood cartoonists kicking the bucket.
For me the "perpetual hunger feeling" went away after... ~12 months of fairly strict dieting. The only food that can still tempt me to overeat is ice cream, so I don't buy it, otherwise I have a full fridge and stick to the schedule without any mental effort.
Here's my longer post if you're interest: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/my-5-step-program-for-losing-weight
It was about the same for me, took about a year to stop being hungry and for my appetite to adjust.
Regarding eating to satiety, I find that *does* work more or less with big piles of vegetables and fruit as snacks.
I believe added sugar is bad, but also, clearly fruit has some kind of protective factor? I've never heard of someone getting fat from fruit.
Fiber from cellulose changes how the sugar is processed.
Thanks for sharing. So It Gets Better, huh? Knowing that there is an actual step change at the end of the tunnel increases my resolve. It's a lot easier to put up with suffering knowing that it'll (eventually) pay off, rather than be this perpetual cycle of guilt and mortification that one dreads as bedtime approaches.
And yeah fruit's amazing, literally Nature's Candy(tm) since I ~don't eat sweets in general. Gimme a big bowl of watermelon or some nice apricots instead. Way less punitive way to get decent fibre versus crucifer crucification too. I just wish it cost a bit less; there's very little satiety factor (I absolutely will eat several pounds of blueberries in one sitting if available) and quality gets real iffy once one starts buying in bulk sizes. >tfw buy a bag of apples and only a couple are genuinely really good but you'd feel like an ass for returning the rest...
Re: hunger at night, I think it's just much easier to be distracted during the day through various forms of stimulation vs lying in bed (especially if not a reader/TV watcher)
That...actually makes a lot of sense? Hunger's edge does tend to sharpen the mind towards a singular driving focus (h/t Jack Dorsey), but that is complely the wrong mental state one wants for falling asleep.
I wish reading worked reliably for me. Sometimes if the material is dreadfully boring, that's good enough to pass out without consciously intending to do so...of course that tends to funge against doing such activities for leisure, which is half the point. Good writing energizes rather than enervates. Tired: A List Of Lethalities (sorry Eliezer). Wired: DWATV roundups.
Ha! Aye, reading can go either way for me, depends how interesting the content is. DWATV is definitely full thinking-mode material.
Aside from that, I'm fortunate that I can completely rip up the sleep rulebook. Sleep best right after a large meal. Can have a coffee and fall asleep 20 mins later. Screens all night, fall asleep while blasting my eyes with a phone screen 6 inches away...
Regarding the keto diet, my impression is that the vast majority of people who would say they are "eating keto" are not actually in ketosis and probably not even all that low carb. Products are frequently labeled "keto friendly" despite having 20% or more calories from carbohydrates, and nobody seems to understand that dietary protein can prevent ketosis. Actually getting into ketosis is quite hard, and not particularly healthy, which is why keto is for the most part correctly described as a fad diet, much the same way as the gluten free diet was a fad diet a decade or so ago, despite being very helpful for people with certain medical conditions.
I briefly tried keto many years ago when I was a bodybuilder (and much more naive on dietetics), agree on difficulty - very easy to consume a few dozen g of carbs one way or the other and prevent it. And pointless unless for medical reasons.
People trying keto, but buying all the fake versions of food, are just setting themselves up for failure. It's sad + expensive. 25g-40g of total carbs per day isn't too hard to hit, so long as you don't eat any processed carbs, and your veg intake is limited to leafy greens (not cabbage), broccoli, green beans, celery, bell peppers, mushrooms and asparagus.
Personally I draw the line at riced cauliflower, anything more processed is too processed, and it should be deployed in moderation.
When I was more into lifting and keto (you know, pre kids when I had 2 hours to lift 5 days a week) I'd eat a keto cookie (quest iirc) and Greekacino (very strong coffee with milk from a goat) 45 minutes before big gym sessions. It was effective, but of course the day your big session turns into a medium session you're screwed.
My late mother died prematurely due to the medical team nurses injecting her lower spine with a death-hastening drug cocktail on Friday evening, April 12, 2024. I was at the foot of her hospital bed, and when the nurses rolled he over on her side, she shrieked out to me repeatedly in terror, "They're killing me." I had previously struggled with PTSD, but OMG, this was exponentially worse than any experience that had come before for either of us. We were hoodwinked into the horrific timing of this outcome. She writhed in her bed for the initial 45 minutes afterward, during which time I was repeatedly unable to get anyone on the floor to see about her. She was then pronounced dead some 7-8 hours later. I stayed with her the whole time, comforting her the best I was able, while struggling not to crumple and pass out in my serious trauma and grief. All of this has and will haunt me until my last breath. I've been told several times that everything unfolded lawfully and ethically, but I'm unsatisfied. While I want to and will remain a modern, logical, and lawful person, there's nonetheless a darker part of me that would summon the Norns, which I don't believe in whatsoever, if I could, to exact a steep revenge.
That experience sounds unbearable! Was that a treatment she had previously agreed to, not having been properly informed first? I don't quite understand.
I am so sorry you went through that. What a terrible experience for both of you.
Ms. Trench, Mariana, Thank you for taking the time to express your kind words. Best, Michael
Quibble about blindness: if you give each blind person the equivalent of a few million dollars, would that still be a disadvantage on net? Is there no amount of money or resources that can compensate for blindness? I'm not claiming there definitely is, but I think this is the framework that those bioethicists are operating from & reasonable minds can disagree.
Set up a fund to blind and compensate bioethicists based on how much money they believe is the socially required amount. You'll figure out quick what that number is.
after that's done, maybe we could round up some 1-year-old, 10-year-old, 25-year-old, 50-year-old, and 75-year-old bioethicists?
Bioethicists generally give me the creeps. I wonder what fraction of them would endorse Aktion T4...
probably negligible - my read is that they're so wedded to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics that they're opposed to society doing anything at all proactive. mass murder is not OK, but mass death due to negligence is OK.
Hmm... That could be, though actively _enforcing_ mass death through negligence is, in effect, just as lethal. Many Thanks!
Yes, this is correct. Non action is the 'bioethicist' call to arms (call to sofa?)
"it is counterproductive and wrong to strike back by saying that since it condemns your children to be worse off that not using selection is unethical."
I can see how it might be counterproductive, but I fail to see how it's *wrong.* It seems obviously correct. "Sorry Jimmy, your parents had religious convictions preventing them from engineering you to be smart and healthy, so you're dumb and crippled. Sucks to be you but something something can't impose moral obligations on prospective parents for the welfare of their children because reasons."
Well, Jimmy would never have been smart and healthy. He would be dead and you would be talking to one of his siblings instead. Perhaps you can see that, even if you don't agree on the object level, "forcing parents to [as they see it] murder their own children" might be wrong. We have conscientious objector laws precisely because we think it is generally bad to force people to do what they consider murder, even when we don't see it the same way.
The "Ozempic's impact on pensions" Reuters article screenshot from the Peter Wildeford X account is fake. I couldn't find any trace of it online except in quote from some random Facebook page.
Some of the insane views of bioethicists seem more explicable in light of the situation with MAID. Object-level the question about whose life to save has an obvious right answer.
But someone who has been trained to constantly think about the history of medical abuses, and who looks at continual efforts to expand the scope of MAID, might read it as "who can we get away with killing?" which may explain the answer of the 63%. Sort of a refusal to cooperate.
Not a defense of the consensus views of the bioethics field. Just an attempt to make sense of what may motivate those views.
Which is the obvious right answer?
1 year old
I think that's only the obvious right answer if you value 'years of live saved' above 'suffering minimised', the inverse resulting in the 10 year old being the right answer, due to the combination of very high unlived life remaining combined with almost adult-level comprehension of death and capacity to suffer deeply prior to it.
I think even as young as 10 years old, people feel some special obligation of care towards infants.
Certainly - we're programmed for that, particularly so as humans due to the comparatively immense resource and time involved in gestation and childrearing and overwhelmingly birthing only one child at a time. But that's genetic survival-driven emotional wiring produced by evolution and doesn't neccessarily neatly map to the answers to ethics questions.
> That was how the process went in 2020, and at that time, the subcommittee of researchers dedicated to alcohol (including Naimi) advised the government to reduce the recommended limit down to one drink per day for men, from two. The Trump administration ultimately decided not to follow the recommendation.
I'd bet most Americans have heard that Trump's #1 rule for himself and his kids was always "No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes," without any evidence or even rumors that Trump is secretly a drinker. Nobody cares about some random "buried" scientific report or what the "official" recommended number of drinks is, but a simple "3 No's" message that Trump follows religiously is extremely powerful. Biden didn't drink either, but you can find tons of photos of him pouring or gifting alcohol to others - e.g., "Biden delivers beer to Shanksville firefighters: ‘I keep my promises’" or "‘Get a shot and have a beer’: Biden touts free brew to boost vaccines."
Quite frankly, I struggle to imagine a person cutting his drinking in half because the FDA announced a new recommendation, but I can easily imagine people second-guessing their drink after hearing Trump repeat the 3 No's somewhere.
Unsavory comments from ex-politicians aside, I don't see anything remotely alarming about 5% of deaths in Canada being from MAID. 25% of Canadians die of cancer[1], so we can approximate the % of deaths that are painful and foreseeable as at least 25%. Given this, it seems reasonable to me that a large % of deaths would be attributable to MAID in a well-run society, and as society improves (fewer accidents and preventable deaths, more accurate prognoses) the percent of deaths attributable to MAID should approach 100% (minus people with religious objections, and until we figure out immortality).
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-44-no-1-2024/canadian-cancer-statistics-2023.html
Yes, I find having the option extremely comforting. I do not intend to spend the last weeks or month of my life in excruciating, semi-lucid pain, and I would rather not have to sneak off to shoot myself behind the shed.
The circumstances around my mom's last week of life are complicated, and this is not the forum for detailed review and analysis. Everything that could go wrong over the course of Mom's last week seemed to, at the time and in hindsight. Broadly speaking, ethical concerns for hunted game, slaughtered farm animals, euthanized pets, assisted suicide, etc, as I understand it, are to reduce or nearly eliminate fear and pain. This important difference in approach distinguishes aspirationally humane. Setting the legalities aside for this snippet of a response, there was no medically necessary point to the suffering both my mom and I experienced at and after the injection of a death-hastening drug cocktail into my mother's lower spine, which had been described euphemistically to me consistently and vaguely, and I feel disingenuously beforehand as pain medication. This is my condensed good-faith effort to respond to, "But I don't quite understand."