Hacker News Reader

Comment by kcl | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to examine the situation by flipping it around.

Suppose the research centered on people who care too much. And the implicit assumption is that people who care too much cause problems, because they make suboptimal decisions for the group. Should we begin to stigmatize these people? Was Mother Theresa psychologically defective? Is your overly caring boss causing problems in the workplace because he won't fire the underperformer nobody likes? What should be done about this endemic problem of overly caring bosses? How can we begin to classify and nullify these people?

In both cases the behavior is nightmarish. Here in stark relief for one kind of bias.

View on HN

I don't want to derail the topic, but Mother Teresa isn't exactly the best kind of example for your argument.

Yes she is.

You've clearly never read The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, by Christopher Hitchens.

Mother Teresa was pure evil.

You should read up on how she intentionally tortured dying people by denying them basic pain killers. How she stipulated the use of dull needles. How she claimed pain was desirable because it was the kiss of Jesus. How she refused to properly treat people that were dying in agony, while her charity hoarded massive sums of money. The stories abound, Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily, both in book and video documentary format.

I know about all of that. That's exactly why I don't think she's a good example of someone who had excessive empathy for others, because she didn't seem to have much empathy at all.

>Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily //

You appear to think Hitchens didn't have a huge axe to grind ...? If you had to pick someone who would be least likely to make an unbiased report of Mother Theresa's actions then he's be pretty close to top of the list.

>How she stipulated the use of dull needles. //

This seems least likely to be possibly contextually twisted; do you have a reference to a corroborating report on such things from a, shall we say, less motivated party?

As the claim is she stipulated it I expect the reasoning is in her letters or the accounts of her workers?

If you think you can make a valid counterpoint via ad hominem instead of with facts you are mistaken.

Questioning someone's potential bias is not an "ad hominem" attack.

If requesting corroboration offends you then you need to ask yourself why.

I've searched the BMJ archive (http://www.bmj.com/archive) and can't find any reference to this particular claim; only a few retrospectives and passing references.

Also where it is mentioned in other literature, the claim is limited to reuse of hypodermics and there is no mention that she specified that hypodermics must be blunt, eg in order to increase the pain of patients - as adventureful appears to intimate.

Given the choice between not getting an innoculation or getting one from a used needle ... well that's a hard choice isn't it. As I can't find the article there is nothing to tell us what factors are at play, the seriousness of the diseases or the attempted mitigation (if there was any).

Dr Robin Fox wrote, in the Lancet, about her home in Calcutta. The Lancet and the BMJ covered her re-use of needles. The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity#Controv...)

>The risk of infection is obvious, especially since there wasn't any differentiation between people with or without a terminal illness. //

What was the result. Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Was there facilities to readily test for preexisting conditions. Were people already known to be diagnosed with [blood] communicative conditions allowed to pass those on?

Whilst the risk of infection may be obvious the action to serve the greater good doesn't appear to be obvious in the depth we have treated this situation so far.

Do you have a link for the Lancet article please?

(http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(...)

Report from someone who used to work with her:

(http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html)

> Were more people killed or were more people saved from the particular illness/disease the injections were treating?

Many people died long slow painful deaths. The pain was deliberate, a function of her distorted thinking.

>Many people died long slow painful deaths. //

How many? Also do you know the answer to the question you cut and pasted ... presumably you've read both those links so you know if there's a quantitative treatment?

All I could find about Haiti wrt the Sisters of Mercy was that the SoM went there in 1991 (according to graphic here, http://www.mercyworld.org/mercy_network/network-map.cfm). Whilst Susan Shields left the order in 1989 after 9 years "living in the Bronx, Rome, and San Francisco" and apparently then published her story of the situation in Haiti that so shocked her another 9 years later in 1998 (http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/index_18.html, http://www.texnews.com/1998/religion/morph0117.html).

I don't have access to the text in the Lancet (which turns out to be a letter to the editor, and so not reviewed) - do you have a link to an open access version?

I realise we're way OT, but I'm keen to investigate this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com