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> But driving it through anecdotes You really want anecdotes in this case because they point to a system that is just getting rid of people for the wrong reaso

> But driving it through anecdotes You really want anecdotes in this case because they point to a system that is just getting rid of people for the wrong reasons. That's called insights.

vlovich123 2y ago
Assuming the anecdotes are correct and capture the entire story - which they rarely actually do in general and especially when you’re talking about death - at best they help land the human story to convince people. But OK. So let’s presume we have anecdotes that show mistakes made in the program. Do we get rid of it? Hospitals and doctors and insurance companies make deadly mistakes too. Get rid of those as well? And what about the anecdotes of people who were greatly positively helped by euthanasia. Do we ignore their anecdotes? How do we weigh their anecdotes against the anecdotes of problems? I may be thick but I’m failing to find the insights you’re claiming are there.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  Why are you jumping the gun? Even if you keep the program this shows that there is a serious lack of oversight. Once people are dead they are gone and nobody to defend them. I must admit that people here tend to be against the death penalty but when it comes to killing people in difficult situations suddenly we need to be super flexible and innocents be damned
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Am I jumping the gun? All I’m saying is that anecdotes are insufficient for making any changes and here you’re claiming that it’s sufficient evidence of a lack of oversight. Yet there are arguably quantifiably more problematic deaths in regular health care (angel of death, malpractice where the doctor shouldn’t be providing any kind of care, etc) but you’re not arguing that there’s clearly a lack of oversight there. My point is the scale of the problem isn’t indicated by anecdotes and thus you can’t presume that any action should be taken by their existence purely from the fact that at any meaningful scale any human activity will have issues because humans. And that’s ignoring that I pointed out the potential problems with the anecdotes presented. It’s worrying that you’re equating the death penalty and suicide when they’re very different things. Assisted suicide involves action by the person to end their life while the death penalty is the government taking that action. Very very very different things. Even more worryingly that you’re outright discounting people killed by the death penalty as not innocent. Ignoring the obvious racial problems with black people being more likely to be sentenced that way since I don’t want to argue about sentencing disparity, the innocence project lets us estimate a lower bound on the amount of innocent people that had been killed before the invention of DNA (and even today after it’s part of the normal course of things). That number by the way I believe (but could be wrong) is higher by volume and percentage than the number of problematic deaths in assisted suicide. Care to rethink your priors about death penalty vs assisted suicide?
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      Incentives are what matters. When a government has a healthcare system already in the red, there is a strong incentive to get rid of weak and ill people from a government standpoint under the pretext of helping terminally ill people to die. You can see that they have been expanding it to people who were not terminally ill. That says everything you need to know. This is akin to "think of the children" excuse used to censor the web. But this time it actually kills people.
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        It’s one thing to be concerned about the problem, it’s another to try to weaponize anecdotes to achieve the aim instead of being intellectually honest and focusing on quantitative data. I’d argue that your position is the “think of the children” position which argues from a place of fear and anecdotes while infantilizing people and removing their autonomy over their own lives. As for incentives, the estimate is that MAID reduces annual spending by ~100 million. The government spends 300B a year on healthcare. You’re not going to get out of this by killing your patients, not to mention that you need productive members in your economy to create a tax base in the first place. I think you have an incorrect analysis of the incentives at play here.
tqi 2y ago
Any policy is going to have instances of people who are harmed that otherwise would not have been. Focusing on those cases is not insightful.

> But driving it through anecdotes You really want anecdotes in this case because they point to a system that is just getting rid of people for the wrong reasons. That's called insights.

vlovich123 2y ago

Assuming the anecdotes are correct and capture the entire story - which they rarely actually do in general and especially when you’re talking about death - at best they help land the human story to convince people. But OK. So let’s presume we have anecdotes that show mistakes made in the program. Do we get rid of it? Hospitals and doctors and insurance companies make deadly mistakes too. Get rid of those as well? And what about the anecdotes of people who were greatly positively helped by euthanasia. Do we ignore their anecdotes? How do we weigh their anecdotes against the anecdotes of problems? I may be thick but I’m failing to find the insights you’re claiming are there.

ekianjo 2y ago
Why are you jumping the gun? Even if you keep the program this shows that there is a serious lack of oversight. Once people are dead they are gone and nobody to defend them. I must admit that people here tend to be against the death penalty but when it comes to killing people in difficult situations suddenly we need to be super flexible and innocents be damned
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Am I jumping the gun? All I’m saying is that anecdotes are insufficient for making any changes and here you’re claiming that it’s sufficient evidence of a lack of oversight. Yet there are arguably quantifiably more problematic deaths in regular health care (angel of death, malpractice where the doctor shouldn’t be providing any kind of care, etc) but you’re not arguing that there’s clearly a lack of oversight there. My point is the scale of the problem isn’t indicated by anecdotes and thus you can’t presume that any action should be taken by their existence purely from the fact that at any meaningful scale any human activity will have issues because humans. And that’s ignoring that I pointed out the potential problems with the anecdotes presented. It’s worrying that you’re equating the death penalty and suicide when they’re very different things. Assisted suicide involves action by the person to end their life while the death penalty is the government taking that action. Very very very different things. Even more worryingly that you’re outright discounting people killed by the death penalty as not innocent. Ignoring the obvious racial problems with black people being more likely to be sentenced that way since I don’t want to argue about sentencing disparity, the innocence project lets us estimate a lower bound on the amount of innocent people that had been killed before the invention of DNA (and even today after it’s part of the normal course of things). That number by the way I believe (but could be wrong) is higher by volume and percentage than the number of problematic deaths in assisted suicide. Care to rethink your priors about death penalty vs assisted suicide?
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    Incentives are what matters. When a government has a healthcare system already in the red, there is a strong incentive to get rid of weak and ill people from a government standpoint under the pretext of helping terminally ill people to die. You can see that they have been expanding it to people who were not terminally ill. That says everything you need to know. This is akin to "think of the children" excuse used to censor the web. But this time it actually kills people.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      It’s one thing to be concerned about the problem, it’s another to try to weaponize anecdotes to achieve the aim instead of being intellectually honest and focusing on quantitative data. I’d argue that your position is the “think of the children” position which argues from a place of fear and anecdotes while infantilizing people and removing their autonomy over their own lives. As for incentives, the estimate is that MAID reduces annual spending by ~100 million. The government spends 300B a year on healthcare. You’re not going to get out of this by killing your patients, not to mention that you need productive members in your economy to create a tax base in the first place. I think you have an incorrect analysis of the incentives at play here.

tqi 2y ago

Any policy is going to have instances of people who are harmed that otherwise would not have been. Focusing on those cases is not insightful.