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To play EA's advocate: if you assume that donating the kidney will "save" a life, then if you had 4,000 kidneys, you could, on average, sacrifice yourself to "s
by npilk 4y ago
To play EA's advocate: if you assume that donating the kidney will "save" a life, then if you had 4,000 kidneys, you could, on average, sacrifice yourself to "save" 4,000 lives. Of course you don't have 4,000 kidneys, but the intuition is that the decision is the same whether you're sacrificing 1/4,000th of your life to save one person, or your whole life to save 4,000.
However, I agree with your point that this isn't really "saving" a life as much as "extending" or "delaying the inevitable". In terms of QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years), the benefit may be much smaller while the risk remains the same. And I especially agree with your conclusion in the last sentence.
- cheese_goddess 4y ago> To play EA's advocate: if you assume that donating the kidney will "save" a life, then if you had 4,000 kidneys, you could, on average, sacrifice yourself to "save" 4,000 lives. No, see, this is what I mean when I say that maths are being misapplied. We know how many kidneys you can donate before you die: two. Or three if you have three. Some people even have four. So what does the "4000" have to do with that? The "4000" is the number of different people who each donated one kidney, so it doesn't tell us anything about one person donating 4000 kidneys. And anyway, if you need to imagine a person with 4000 kidneys before you can figure out the value of live kidney donation, then you don't have a good way to figure out the value of live kidney donation. Which is my point.
- imtringued 4y agoActually the assumption is that you have an endless quantity of kidneys and the expected number of donated kidneys until you die is 4000.
- cheese_goddess 4y agoThat alone should help to see why it's all a completely absurd idea.