TK-421
19hr ago
Sorry, I don't think I explained the dilemma well. Taking a treatment that has an 80% - or 10%, or .5% - chance of saving your life is obviously the right choice. Dying due to the accident or dying due to complications from the emergency treatment is basically the same result.
The 20% in question is the risk that the treatment successfully saves my life but causes significant brain damage. Scenarios where I live but I'm in a minimally conscious state or have other significant deficits.
When I examine my decision making around how I should choose in this (very low probability) scenario, I find that my concern isn't really quality of life related. If I could somehow know that these injuries wouldn't destroy information in my brain in a way that even future sci-fi medicine couldn't restore then I would prefer to take the treatment. I'd live the remainder of my life with that damage, die, and (in this ideal, also very low probability scenario) be restored. The whole idea of cryonics, to me, is to preserve as much information as possible to increase the probability that some set of future technologies can restore a person from that information. My instinct is to take the option that more likely preserves the most information.
TK-421
1d ago
Dying is concerning. Like other panicked easy marks, I'm signed up for cryonics. Although I think it's very unlikely to work - call it a 1% chance - it still beats the baseline.
I engage in moderately risky activities and if my death occurs in the next 5-ish years it will almost certainly be due to an accident. Most scenarios kill or incapacitate me from meaningful decision making outright. Some don't, however, and it's possible that I could be mortally injured while retaining my basic decision making abilities.
Assuming that I find myself in one of these's rare scenarios, let's say I'm offered a choice. Without emergency treatment I will die. This treatment has an around 20% chance of causing significant additional damage to my brain. Damage that could not be undone even under best sci-fi medical advancements should the cryonics process work. Even with the treatment I have suffered irrevocable damage and it's unknown if it may be progressive.
My instinct is to request that doctors treat me as if I had died in the accident and begin the cryonics process in as controlled and ideal fashion as possible. I know that in practice that's a request that's unlikely to be granted, I'm just not sure if it would be the right choice.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
TK-421
5d ago
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.
Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.
I think I can understand a feeling of betrayal from the process on an emotional level but I'm not sure I really get it. For instance, I didn't just donate to Amy Klobuchar, I made her tater tot hotdish recipe. It was pretty good. But I didn't feel like her dropping out of the race well before my state's primary represented the DNC betraying me or nefariously preventing me from picking my preferred candidate. Weaker candidates dropping out and consolidating behind a more popular candidate with similar views is just an actual part of the primary process as it exists. It would be interesting to see the effects of switching to some kind of one day primary-palooza where every state votes simultaneously but that is not, and never has been, how the primaries work.
Warren staying in the race through Super Tuesday probably did hurt Bernie. Presumably Sanders was the second choice of some fraction of her voters. But as you note, she represents a more institutional strain of the left and (although we'll never know) it's unlikely that enough of her voters would have gone with him to change the outcome. It's just as likely that the majority of her voters would have gone to Biden.
If primary voters wanted Sanders they could have had him. They did not. The fact that voters picked the more centrist candidate - and that there were other more centrist politicians in the race with non-negligible support in the first place - shows where the actual center of gravity was in the party. Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.
TK-421
6d ago
...and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass.
Can you please explain how Bernie received an ass fucking? The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race, not that he was the victim of forced sodomy. I am very curious to know if that was not the case.
Well, yeah. For me at least it's explicitly about filling the God-shaped hole in reality. If I thought religion could credibly - even at very low probability, like cryonics - offer a path to immortality, I'd take it. I very much want what religion is selling, there's just nothing it has in stock that can fulfill my order.
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