domain:aporiamagazine.com
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
She went through all the loops and hoops, she didn't change her mind.
This is a very critical point. By saying "MAID is in principle on the table for depression", you create some incentive to engage with the medical system.
If instead you take the firm stand that suicide is bad and that you will gladly lock up patients who talk about suicidal ideation until they learn to credibly deny having such thoughts, that is sending a very different signal.
As others have pointed out here, anyone who is not bedbound has a BATNA, which is to kill themselves against the wishes of broader society. Unilateral suicides impose great costs on broader society. You can not let your loved ones know lest they call the cops on you -- unless you trust them to approve your defection. While medically, killing a person in a way which is both painless and also not highly disturbing to onlookers is a solved problem, the situation for the average person is very different, and they may well prefer an option which is good at delivering a quick death but traumatizing for the onlookers. Jumping in front of trains has massive externalities, for example.
Knowing that your loved one is opting for MAID for depression is terrible, but what is worse is coming home and finding them dangling from a rope -- without you ever having had a chance to talk to them about it or say goodbye to them. If offering MAID for depression turns 10 suicides into 7 suicides (who do not want to jump through the hoops) plus 1 medically assisted death and two patients who can be treated to a level where their life is positive-sum for them, that seems like a clear win.
Rov_Scam
7hr ago
@self_made_human, it's been a couple of weeks since we had that AI discussion and you agreed to run a couple trials for me. I apologize for not getting to it sooner, but I had some big idea that I was going to find representative examples for each category and see how well it did, and update the algorithm to be more precise with regard to how I actually do it manually, but I of course didn't have the time to spend and it fell by the wayside. So I'll just throw out two releases to get you started for now, for which the suboptimal algorithm is irrelevant:
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The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love
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Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat
I'll try to post some more that present different challenges to see how the model handles them, but these two highlight something that the free models of ChatGTP seemed to struggle with.
To make things easier, these are both American releases. So you don't have to look back, here are the instructions:
For major label albums released circa 1991 or later, an official street date should be available. This gets first priority. If a release date is provided by a reputable source such as RateYourMusic, Wikipedia, or 45Cat, use that date, giving 45Cat priority. If a reputable source only provides a month of release, use that as a guideline for further research, subject to change if the weight of the evidence suggests that this is incorrect. If any other source purports a specific release date, use that date, provided it does not conflict with information provided in reputable sources. Other sources include other websites, Google search results, and message board comments. For US releases from 1978 to the present, use the date of publication from the US Copyright Office website if available. For US releases from 1972 to 1978, use the date of publication from the US Copyright physical indexes, images of which are available on archive.org, if available. For releases prior to 1972 or are otherwise unavailable from the above sources, determine the "usual day of release" of the record label, that being the day of the week that the majority of the issues with known release dates were released. Be aware that this can change over time. If no information is available regarding the usual day of release, default to Monday. If ARSA chart data for the release is available, assign the release date to the usual day of release immediately prior to the date of the chart. (ARSA is a website that compiles local charts from individual radio stations). If ARSA chart data is unavailable, assign the release date to the usual day of release the week prior to the date when the release was reviewed by Billboard, first appeared in a chart, or was advertised in Billboard. If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date (ARSA will almost always be earlier unless there was a substantial delay between release and initial charting). If neither ARSA nor Billboard data is available, use a similar system with any other trade publication. If no trade publication or chart data is available, determine the order of release based on catalog number. Assume that the items are released sequentially and are evenly spaced. Use known release dates (or release months) to calculate a reasonable date of release based on available information, including year of release (if known), month of release (if known) and usual day of release. If none of the above can be determined, make a reasonable estimate based on known information.
The following caveats also apply:
For non-US releases, domestic releases often trailed their foreign counterparts by several months. Any data derived from US sources must take this into account when determining if the proposed estimate is reasonable.
If the date of recording is known, any estimated release date must take into consideration a reasonable amount of time between recording and release based on what was typical of the era. For independent releases, dates of release from Bandcamp may be used provided they don't conflict with known information (i.e. sometimes Bandcamp release dates will use the date of upload, or the date of a CD reissue).
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
They had tons of resources, and there never had been "total blockades". How do you think they built miles of tunnels and thousands of rockets? Where do you think all their weapons are from? Did they magic it out from sea water and sand? No, they used the materials that came for declared civilian purposes, and money sent by petro-emirates, Iran and other deep-pocketed Muslim sponsors and they used it exactly for what they wanted - preparing for war. And what they coudn't get in openly, they got clandestinely via border tunnels, which were numerous and virtually ignored by Egypt. They had all the industry they wanted - it's just the industry they wanted is making rockets, not tractors or computers. If Hamas wanted to turn Gaza into Taiwan - there would be billions of oil dollars available for them to do that. But the whole point of Gaza is to be a problem for Israel, and the whole point of Hamas is to wage war on Israel, everything else is secondary. And since the population of Gaza does not seem to have any problem with that goal - they have what they have.
It's a prison.
It's a weird kind of prison, where offering to leave is called racist and genocide, and asking to at least stop making weapons and lobbing them over the fence is taken as crazy talk. I don't think there's another "prison" like that in the world, where the inmates have full control, regularly try (very often successfully) to murder the guards, and the guards respond with providing them free food and offering them to leave whenever they want, which is always rejected.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
7hr ago
This argument worked great some decade ago, when Europe could plausibly claim to be as free as the US. When they're canceling elections because the wrong candidate won,
I note, without comment, that my most downvoted posts on the Motte are those claiming, correctly, that the 2020 US Presidential election was not rigged.
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
Oh no, you are not fair to them. They built a lot of infrastructure. Every school, hospital or mosque had under it a bunker for storing arms, hiding troops and supplies for Hamas. Every schoolyard and hospital grounds double as missile launching site. Miles of tunnels have been built, and not just some rat holes, but tunnels you can live in for months, with ventilation, facilities, food storage, multiple exits in private houses and businesses all over the place. It's a lot of infrastructural work, and they have been very busy for two decades. It is true that this infrastructure has only one goal - war with Israel - and is completely useless otherwise, but I don't see the citizens of Gaza to mind too much. Surely, when they are losing the war, they don't like it, but the whole concept of being in eternal war with Israel, even if this means living in medieval conditions and spending all the money on building more war infrastructure and sacrificing all their kids to the war effort - they are completely fine with this concept. They actually want this, more than anything. Maybe not 100% of them, but about 90% for sure. Their only problem with the war is that they are currently losing badly.
prungus
7hr ago
Most doctors have some combination of research, teaching, administrative, and managerial duties all of which bleed outside of traditional work hours in the usual ways.
I have a few doctor friends, most in family med, 1 in ophthalmology, 1 in podiatry (debatable) , and my wife's family are mostly doctors, including radiology, physiatry, and neurology.
Ive never heard of any of them doing any "research, teaching, administrative, or managerial work" past residency. They all seem to work 30-40h a week doing pretty much "doctor stuff" only.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
I’m not going to say it’s impossible that this one is the one, but I think as far as putting money down, I’d wait a year or so to see if the hype is just hype or if it’s real, or if there’s not going to be issues with side effects making the product only “worth the risk” for people who are either going to lose several hundred pounds or die. If the product is only going to be used on the population of people who weigh 300+ lbs, that’s a much smaller customer base than if it can be used by every woman looking to lose ten pounds to fit a swimsuit or wedding dress. If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
Disease is defined somewhat tautologically, since we usually define health (or the WHO does) as:
a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity
Google tells me that they haven't bothered to define disease. Well, a disease is anything that impacts you negatively and isn't something like a car crash or a bullet to the head.
Wikipedia goes for:
A disease is a particular abnormal condition that adversely affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism and is not immediately due to any external injury
This has plenty of room for arguments, even if I find some deeply stupid or misguided. Some deaf and autistic people claim that trying to cure their conditions, or that of their children, is medicalizing a "normal" or equally valid state of being, and tantamount to genocide.
I have no sympathy for such a position, sure, mild autism isn't that bad, but if they're non-verbal and low-functioning, almost everyone wants them cured. At best, I support individual autonomy enough that if a deaf person insisted that they wished to remain deaf, they have the right to refuse treatment. I begrudgingly concede that they should have the right to make that decision for their children, even if I think it's a really dumb one.
Fortunately, the sufferers of most diseases seek cures. There's no movement to redefine psoriasis, fungal feet infections or heart attacks as a manifestation of the human condition that shouldn't be eliminated. Doctors just nod at the dumb stuff, and keep doing what seems sensible. Or at least I do.
Tree
7hr ago
I don’t know how your friend managed that; In the original thread, the OP of little faith had given the put he dared us to buy – CCL was trading at 42, the 30 put a year out was 1.35. The next month the stock fell to 12 ; so that ‘s 13x, then it fell even further to 8, before rebounding, so if held till expiration, 7x.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
I don't see how this implies that any user must submit the literal first draft they write.
Consider the following:
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You write a comment or essay.
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You do an edit pass and proof read it. Corrections happen.
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You might ask your buddy to take a look. They raise some valid points, and you make corrections.
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You post. Then people come up with all kinds of responses. Some thoughtful and raising valid concerns. Some of them that make you wonder what the fuck is going on. (You must be, to some degree, a rather masochistic individual to be an active Mottizen)
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You either edit your essay to incorporate corrections, clarifications, or start digging into topics in sub-threads.
The place where LLMs come in is stage 2/3, at least for me. I ask them if I am genuinely steelmanning the argument I'm making, if I haven't misrepresented my sources or twisted the interpretation. If you do not objection to having a friend look at something you've written, I do not understand why you would have concerns about someone asking an LLM. The real issue, is, as far as I'm concerned, people simply using the ease of LLM issue to spam or to trivially stonewall faster than a normal person can write, or to simply not even bother to engage with the argument in the first place. I think I've framed my stance as "I don't mind if you use ChatGPT in a conversation with me, as long as your arguments are your own and you are willing to endorse anything you borrow from what it says."
As evidence I've shared suggests, all arguments are my own. I have made sure to carefully double check anything new LLMs might have to add.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
Is that how it works? Nobody told me!
On a more serious note: Do you actually think that writing a well-reasoned, thoughtful and insightful essay is a guarantee that nobody here will come and argue with you?
I wish that were true. At the bare minimum, the population of the Motte is extremely heterogeneous, and someone will find a way to critique you from their own idiosyncratic perspective.
That is the point. That is why I come here, to polish my wits and engage in verbal spars with gentleman rules at play.
A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
I genuinely think that is impossible in practice. There's a reason for that saying about every modus tollens having a modus ponens. Someone will come in and challenge your beliefs here, even if the topic is what anime you like. There is a lot of fundamental difference in both opinion and normative, epistemic and moral frameworks here!
In the limit, values are orthogonal to intelligence. If I was relying on some ASI to craft the perfect essay about how fans of Tokyo Ghoul should seppuku, then what's stopping someone from coming in and using their ASI to argue the opposite?
We do not have ASI. An LLM cannot replace me today. The day has yet to come when shooting the shit with internet strangers is made obsolete for my purposes. I would be sad if that day actually comes, but I think it's a good while off.
In the meantime, I'm here to dance.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
8hr ago
Well, the lipostat theory would suggest that the obese already suffer from disrupted homeostasis via leptin resistance. Under that paradigm, GLP-1s are more akin to insulin for diabetics than more tolerance-building substances.
cjet79
8hr ago
People are not allowed to express an interest in committing suicide without being subject to a whole of oversight and interruption to their life. This can be a good thing to prevent suicide, but it makes all survey data about suicidal willingness a little suspect.
I'd also say that every suicide that happens via someone torturing themselves to death via one of the harder methods is something that could have been prevented with more painless methods being available. At least they could have had a more peaceful death.
SSCReader
8hr ago
I also, simultaneously, feed them into a more powerful reasoning model such as o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro for the purposes of noting any flaws in reasoning. They are very good at finding reasoning flaws, less so at catching errors in citations. Still worth using.
But isn't that the point of posting here?
"This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases"
If you're testing your reasoning against an LLM first then you're kind of skipping part of the entire point of this space no? We should pointing out flaws in your reasoning. You're making an arguably better individual post/point, at the expense of other readers engagement and back and forth. Every time the LLM points out flaws in your reasoning you are reducing the need for us, your poor only human interlocuters. You're replacing us with robots! You monster! Ahem.
If the LLM's at any point are able to completely correct your argument then why post it here at all? We 're supposed to argue to understand, so if the LLM gets you to understanding then literally the reason for the existence of this forum vanishes. It's just a blog post at best.
It's like turning up for sex half way to climax from a vibrating fleshlight then getting off quickly with your partner. If your goal is just having a baby (getting a perfect argument) then it's certainly more efficient. But it kind of takes away something from the whole experience of back and forth (so to speak) with your partner I would suggest.
Now it's not as bad as just ejaculating in a cup and doing it with a turkey baster, start to finish, but it's still a little less...(self_made_)human?
Not saying it should be banned (even if it could be reliably) but I'd probably want to be careful as to how much my argument is refined by AI. A perfectly argued and buttressed position would probably not get much discussion engagement because what is there to say? You may be far from that point right now, but maybe just keep it in mind.
TeknOShEeP
8hr ago
Lol, options are so much fun. They will fuck you 99.99% of the time. But the one time they dont... your broker calls you on January 27 about that Gamestop $10 call you bought 6 months ago on the advice of some idiot degen who's math actually penciled out. "Dude... you gonna exercise or what?"
Crowstep
8hr ago
It's not definitive evidence, but it's definitely evidence. The fact that no country on the planet except the UK has something like the NHS is good evidence that a single, national health service is a bad way to run things, because if such a system were good other countries would have copied it.
Similarly, the fact that the entire world has looked at US gun culture and laws and nobody has decided to copy them is evidence that they aren't worth copying.
Corvos
8hr ago
Dementia and Alzheimers disease
ischaemic heart disease
Forgive the aside, but what is the meaning of the word 'disease' in medical parlance? I suppose in the back of my mind I was aware of 'heart disease' but I would normally think of 'disease' as synonymous with 'infection'.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
A major issue:
Terminal illness is not strictly defined, and neither is low quality of life. It's more of a know it when you see it kinda deal.
If you're willing to settle for proxies -
Current estimates suggest that approximately 75% of people approaching the end-of-life may benefit from palliative care. The growing numbers of older people and increasing prevalence of chronic illness in many countries mean that more people may benefit from palliative care in the future, but this has not been quantified. The present study aims to estimate future population palliative care need in two high-income countries.
My quick trawl of the literature suggests that ~95% of all deaths in the Anglosphere are due to illness and not external factors. I mean, if a disease kills you, I'd certainly call it terminal at some point. Most of these patients have some combination of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer and so on.
This is illustrative. I manually added all the leading causes:
Dementia and Alzheimers disease continued to be the top leading cause of death, continuing the pre-pandemic trend. There were 66,876 deaths with an underlying cause of dementia and Alzheimers disease, accounting for 11.6% of all deaths registered in 2023.
Following dementia and Alzheimers disease, the remaining leading causes of death in England and Wales were:
ischaemic heart diseases (57,895 deaths; 10.0% of all deaths, and a 2.5% decrease in deaths from 2022)
chronic lower respiratory diseases (32,106 deaths; 5.5% of all deaths, and a 7.7% increase in deaths from 2022)
cerebrovascular diseases (29,474 deaths; 5.1% of all deaths, and a 0.7% increase in deaths from 2022)
malignant neoplasm of trachea, bronchus and lung (27,923 deaths; 4.8% of all deaths, and a 2.3% decrease in deaths from 2022)
influenza and pneumonia (24,240 deaths; 4.2% of all deaths, not a leading cause in 2022)
4.2+4.8+5.1+5.5+10+11.6 (the big 6) add up to 41.2%. That leaves every other thing that kills people.
Note that is not exhaustive, and this kind of data is a pain to collate. I hope that even just going by the biggest causes makes it clear that a 5% MAID rate is nothing to write home about. @iprayiam3 is, to out it bluntly, terribly miscalibrated. People can just say things, and be wrong on the internet, while bringing no facts to the table themselves.
My own figures of 20-30% are hardly perfect, but they're certainly closer to plausible figures for people undergoing rather unseemly and painful deaths. They came from a strong hunch, and it's clear that working in medicine makes that gut feeling more accurate.
Now that I know more accurate values, I can see a plausible case for much higher rates.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Seconded. My father got Alzheimer around retirement age. Initially it was not too bad, but in a decade it reduced him to the cognitive level of a new-born. The end came when he finally could no longer swallow. Dying from a lack of fluids and food is not a good death. For an elderly person who is not already weakened by cancer, it also takes fucking forever. Three days without water might kill a healthy adult, but for someone who was just laying in bed before it can be two weeks. To my knowledge I have never killed a mammal in my life, but I would have gladly injected him with pentobarbital. Instead, we played by the restrictive German laws and waited for nature to take its course, never knowing if what was left of him was in pain (despite the opiates he got). 0/10 as far as ways to die go.
The trouble with dementia is that nobody will respect your living will. MAID for lucid cancer patients is one thing, MAID for someone who is no longer lucid is something entirely different. So you basically have to off yourself while your quality of life is still positive.
cjet79
8hr ago
What is it gonna take for you play underwater hockey?
I need help getting new recruits and keeping them around.
TeknOShEeP
8hr ago
Agreed only on practical grounds, and only for the moment.
It is impossible with current technology to not use a nuclear bomb and adversely affect basically everyone on Earth. Millions of people use guns every day without affecting anyone who doesnt choose to be affected (usually on the gun range wearing ear pro). When humanity spreads among the stars, if you want to make pretty flashes on airless chunks of rock utterly devoid of life, you should be able to.
cjet79
8hr ago
Knew an East Asian looking woman with a Hispanic looking last name, but an accent that only sort of seemed like a Spanish accent. Then met her white friends that she went to college with that all had the same accent.
Felt more comfortable asking them and finally got the obvious answer to her origins I should have realized sooner: Brazil.
cjet79
8hr ago
You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.
This is both mind-blowing and completely believable.
Both of my father's parents had signed and notarized DNR (do not resuscitate) orders drafted, with copies kept with their lawyer and stuck to the fridge with a magnet, since they were in their early 70s. And they established power of attorney in their children with very clear instructions that when in doubt, pull the plug. It's not exactly euthanasia, but there are steps you can take to pre-establish consent if you're proactive.
It's morbid, but it's never too early to set your affairs in order. Don't trust your fate to the decision-making skills of a dementia-ridden potato and your grieving children.
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