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domain:theintrinsicperspective.com

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support.

The Allies (primarily the US) provided a total of something like 650,000 tons of materiel to China via The Hump, at the cost of nearly 600 aircraft and around 1700 crew lost. There were also notable Allied air units (and some ground units) in China during the war.

Which isn't to diminish their accomplishment, but it wasn't completely a solo effort.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I am getting deja vu, and not just because of sleep deprivation.

As a matter of fact, I have previously addressed the exact same case. In short, I think the doctors did the right thing.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302719?context=8#context

An article about her case, published in April, was picked up by international media, prompting an outcry that caused Ter Beek huge distress.

She said it was understandable that cases such as hers – and the broader issue of whether assisted dying should be legal – were controversial. “People think that when you’re mentally ill, you can’t think straight, which is insulting,” she told the Guardian. “I understand the fears that some disabled people have about assisted dying, and worries about people being under pressure to die.

“But in the Netherlands, we’ve had this law for more than 20 years. There are really strict rules, and it’s really safe.”

Under Dutch law, to be eligible for an assisted death, a person must be experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. They must be fully informed and competent to take such a decision.

...

Ter Beek’s difficulties began in early childhood. She has chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and unspecified personality disorder. She has also been diagnosed with autism. When she met her partner, she thought the safe environment he offered would heal her. “But I continued to self-harm and feel suicidal.”

She embarked on intensive treatments, including talking therapies, medication and more than 30 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). “In therapy, I learned a lot about myself and coping mechanisms, but it didn’t fix the main issues. At the beginning of treatment, you start out hopeful. I thought I’d get better. But the longer the treatment goes on, you start losing hope.”

After 10 years, there was “nothing left” in terms of treatment. “I knew I couldn’t cope with the way I live now.” She had thought about taking her own life but the violent death by suicide of a schoolfriend and its impact on the girl’s family deterred her.

She has a point. If you're not familiar with the management of severe depression, then by the time you reach ECT, you've exhausted all the options. I don't know if she tried things along the lines of ketamine or psychedelics, but those don't work for everyone.

She's tried everything, it didn't work, and she's clearly suffering immensely.

This woman, the purported victim, seems entirely lucid and defending the medical establishment that's carrying out her wishes. What more can you possibly ask for? It is clearly not spur of the moment decision, she's engaged with the options that the medical field can offer her.

The only thing that I would (personally) say that strikes me as untrue is that there "there's no hope". I think I have strong reasons to hope got a cure for depression, but that isn't a certainty, and could take decades even for myself.

If someone doesn't have the same degree of confidence in future medicine or a technological singularity, then I think that's acceptable shorthand. Strictly speaking, there's always a possibility that someone might just develop a brain tumor that makes them not depressed (or at least makes them manic), but that's not particularly reliable.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

It wasn't seen as a failure, if there was no punishment

I can only address this if you link to the specific instance(s) of this happening.

The governments don't run on Open Source. If euthanasia was legalized with the intention of lowering healthcare costs, even if based completely on the own initiative of the patient, it's still meets the criteria for a systemic failure. However, without access to all communications and private conversations of all public officials involved in the decision, proving it will be impossible, and so your request is unreasonable.

This is, as far as I can tell, a fully generalized counter-argument against having a government at all. Or at least an argument for inventing mind reading devices and strapping them to every politician and bureaucrat. Once they're invented, we can re-examine this, and with my mild approval.

Why is cost-cutting inherently a bad thing? If drug X comes out that roughly does the same thing as drug Y, why would it be bad for a healthcare system to preference one over the other? Money matters (citation not needed), money saved somewhere can, at least theoretically, be spent elsewhere. If we're not spending tens of thousands of $currency on keeping someone who is going to die in a few days or months alive for the sake of it, then that money is available for other tasks.

For the sake of pragmatism, I don't care very nearly as much about why things are done, as I do about how they're done or their outcomes.

You should at least provide a plausible explanation of how these doctors came up with the idea to offer euthanasia in these cases, that doesn't condemn the system. My most mundane one is that they got a pamphlet telling them to shill it, so they shilled it. That's still a systemic failure.

What. I think it's a tad-bit much to expect me to do that. You can Google that yourself, I fail to see what I can add since I live and work in jurisdictions where euthanasia is yet to be legalized.

But, in short:

  1. Is patient sad/in pain? And not just a stubbed toe, to the point they're asking for the release of death. Or don't have the cognition left to ask.

  2. Can we do something about that?

  3. Have we tried? Anything left to try?

  4. Consider euthanasia based on previous points.

  5. Talk to them, their family, and a few lawyers before proceeding.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I'm not sure about the Netherlands.

E.g. they killed a 29 year old woman even though she was perfectly healthy. Did they try any of the bleeding edge treatments of depression? E.g. a week long sleep deprivation fixes treatment resistant depression ?

You could actually find out how much of depression is genetic, and how much is learned. We are reasonably sure memory can be erased, so why dispose of valuable, healthy human resources through euthanasia? Maybe it could be a way of rehabilitating criminal sociopaths..

If we don't trust competent adults to make informed decisions about their own deaths, even with appropriate safeguards and cooling-off periods, then we don't really trust them to be autonomous agents at all.

How is that surprising? The world's most enlightened and civilized people, Europeans, are against free expression because they correctly recognized the famous, reviled but unquestionably true in principle american dictum:

“We conclude that about nineteen out of twenty individuals have “a natural and inalienable right” to be taken care of and protected, to have guardians, trustees, husbands or masters; in other words they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves. The one in twenty are clearly born or educated in some way fitted for command and liberty.”

If they did not believe that people are sheep, easily led astray, they'd not be restricting the internet, free expression, suppressing holocaust denial, banning Russian TV and so on.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I didn't decide to do anything at all. I'm talking about an existing system, which was created over decades by people with far more degrees and alphabets after their name. Give me ten years, maybe 20,before I get there.

It is obvious to me that even attempting to frame the system-as-it-exists as exclusively deontological or utilitarian/consequentialist is at least partially a category error. There are a lot of sticky fingers in that pie.

What I am advocating for is a better system overall. I think the existing system is okay. Not great, not terrible. Hence the critique.

we'd be living in ancap insurance-ocracy, not what we have today.

Would it surprise you to find out that I would actually prefer to live there? One of the many reasons I dream of moving State-side is because it's the closest any country has ever come to embodying those aspirations.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

You'll just have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.

As far as I'm concerned, the most compelling reason to not worry too much about anything but the most-blatant usage of LLMs is that it is almost impossible to tell. There are obviously hints, but they are noisy ones. Anyone who opts to be careful can get away with it easily. About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.

I am deeply annoyed by implicit accusations of cheating by generating even a substantial portion of my work with AI, or worse, trying to disguise and launder LLM-usage. I consider even the weaker claims that I use LLMs to help me write to be as farcical as accusing SS of being an anti-semite. For once in my life, like him, I'd go "yeah? And?".

(This is not a personal attack on you, I know we have probably irreconcilable differences of opinion, but you're one of the "LLM-skeptics" here who is open to alternative arguments and willing to engage in proper debate. My blood pressure doesn't rise when talking to you, and I'm grateful for that)

I've already shared screenshots. I would even share the very first draft, which I was writing in the text box as a response here. This post is from 4 hours back, and about an hour before I submitted the final essay. I think that's a sufficient amount of time to write said essay from scratch. I can't fake the time stamps without a time machine, and even GPT-5 can't build those yet. I think it's the version in one of the Gemini 2.5 screenshots, but god only knows at this point. I'm not kidding about staying up still almost 7 am.

If after that much time and hard work, I face such concerns, then what can I even say? I bother now both because I'm definitely not getting any sleep, and so I have something to link to if this happens again.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

In that case I have no choice but to concede. Actual gorilla warfare would have the Japs on the run.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

We accept a small, managed risk of systemic medical error because the alternative is a certainty of systemic medical neglect. That is the only sensible way of going about such things without, as I've said before, literally infinite money/resources.

That's still deontology. How did you decide who gets to do the "managing"? You think that's based on raw numbers of successes and failures, or assetions of authority deciding to crush your supposedly beloved principle of autonomy under it's boot? If the system worked the way you describe, we'd be living in ancap insurance-ocracy, not what we have today.