Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

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I mostly disagree although I understand and appreciate the sentiment of your post.

You have to consider first of all that we're working with scarce resources. When we're not, it's not even an issue to compare two lives if you can save them both. But in the case that there are limited resources and you happen to have to choose between focusing on two different groups of people and make that tradeoff, you inevitably have to base your decision on something.

Now if you have a 15 year old kid and an 80 year old person, and both are dying from some preventable disease at a rate of 1% per year, and you have a scarce budget to focus on researching one particular disease, which one do you choose to focus on?

Well flipping a coin is probably shit. But making a ranking based on qualify adjusted life years[0] probably makes more sense. Of course it's not perfect, but it's not beyond offensive if you ask me to go about reasoning like this to partially inform policy decisions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

I ask this in seriousness -- why do we judge the possibility of the future as more valuable than the certainty of the past?

That is, why do people tend to be more sad when a kid has cancer than an old person? A child hasn't had decades to interact with and influence other people's lives. In terms of the sadness inflicted if someone were to die, an older person will have affected hundreds of lives, built things, had families, etc.

A child hasn't really impacted anyone except their parents.

I feel there's an underlying attitude that older people have had their time, and it's only right that a young person gets their chance.

But I'm not at all sure if that's true, and I wonder how much of this conversation is based on an assumption that we haven't explored verywell.

Tou need to luck at marginal cost: An old person is going to die, 100% chance, and that will cause sadness, etc. The question is what is the marginal value in each extra year of life, not is the death itself undesirable.

Your question also touches on abortion, and the argument that a fetus deserves less protection from society because of its lack of social connection. http://www.equip.org/article/steven-pinkers-evolutionary-exp...

But you touch on a deeper question also: "saving lives" is a very modern idea. Traditionally, death was quote common all all corners of society, and the solution was to make more new people.

We are used to parents and grandparents dying. We are not used to kids dying.

I think back in the times when child deaths were common, it was less hard to handle.

I suspect the idea sounds 'wrong' when talking about adults, but most people feel it is intuitive when talking about young children. Which person should you rescue first, the 4 year old or the 64 year old?

These issues I suspect are very rife for post-hoc rationalisation around gut-feelings of morality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YL3LT1ZvOM

We're not talking about research funding. The comment I replied to referenced NHS placing a monetary value on a single year of life, which directly means that young people are "worth more" than older people.

What scarce resources are you referring to in the developed world?

Bill Gates turns 60 this year. It's pretty safe to assume he'll accomplish more in the next 20 years than you will in your lifetime.

> What scarce resources are you referring to in the developed world?

What kind of question is this? You think we have infinite medical researchers with infinite resources and infinite budgets? All countries, including the richest ones, have budgets.

> Bill Gates turns 60 this year. It's pretty safe to assume he'll accomplish more in the next 20 years than you will in your lifetime.

Oh god you can't really think that's a good argument, can you? Citing Gates as your anecdotal evidence to make a point about policy that affects millions of people is outright silly. It's like saying government policy should prevent people from going to university, and dropping out once they get in, because hey Bill Gates did it and look how that turned out. Why refer to one of the most extreme outliers in modern history as a justification for medical policy for completely different, average people?

I don't even get what your point is. I made the point that it probably makes more sense to save 1% of 15 year olds (or 25 year olds for that matter, considering the other post on how children distort our perspective of morality), than 1% of 80 year olds, or 60 year olds for that matter, given a common situation of scarce resources and the need to make a trade off. (again in cases where resource scarcity doesn't matter, the discussion is irrelevant).

If you want to counter that with the point that 'but some 60 year olds are still productive, look at bill gates, his impact will be tremendous the next decades' then you fail to see how statistically that 60 year old may have already been dead 35 years earlier, and that statistically for every bill gates you'd save at 60, in this hypothetical situation, you'd give up a younger bill gates who now dies at 25, and it may be said that despite his tremendous impact late in life, it doesn't rival his impact earlier in life, and that this (having more impact before 60 than after 60) probably holds true on average, generally speaking. No amount of anecdotal evidence changes that fact.

You don't need infinite resources for a finite amount of people. You are exaggerating the choice.

The point is that you don't need to give up a younger Bill Gates for an older one.

As for the impact of his accomplishments, I think we'll need to wait until the end to evaluate it. You could argue that saving millions of lives and offering tens of millions better, healthier lives is more impactful.

The scarce resources implied here is the money that the government spends on medical treatment for the elderly, poor and disabled. Bill Gates obviously could always buy his own medical treatment.

Yes, if you have to treat everyone with Alzheimer's or cancer, that could be expensive. On their the hand, once you develop inexpensive cures, it's not such a burden.

Sure, but the money Bill Gates spends on medical treatment takes resources away from other things. Even if supply is elastic enough to adjust, it's unlikely to adjust immediately, and the adjustment will still reduce resources that would have been consumed elsewhere.

Money is a claim on future productivity. Spending it causes people in the world to adjust what they're doing to satisfy what you're asking for. Most of our claims aren't very large though, so this isn't particularly noticeable except in aggregate.

Really? The Foundation has been founded. Does it need Bill?

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