“A week every year in an elite medical facility being tested for everything that could possibly go wrong.”
This is also an ambiguous good. There is a point where the increased risk of iatrogenic harm rises faster than the risk of other illness falls. Taleb conjectures that this effect plays a part in the fact that there seems to be only a small correlation between health and access to healthcare after a very minimal amount of access is surpassed.
I briefly worked in a hospital, and the biggest issue they were facing was infections people got from being in the hospital. That's when I learned that a significant number of people in the hospital would actually be better off going home or never going to the hospital, despite actually having a need for treatment for some kind of ailment. Obviously the hospital's stance was that they needed to reduce the infections, rather than turn people away. The biggest change - denying people catheters, including when patients requested to have one. This alone made a substantial difference in the outcome of patients. Denying "care" was the best thing for their health.
"What people actually mean by a living wage, as best I can tell, is a wage at which they can imagine themselves living a tolerable life."
I have come to the conclusion that there is not point in trying to understand how people live with less than a third or more than three times more of what I earn. If this were applicable to most of us, I guess a living wage is one third of what whoever says it is earning himself.
An uncharacteristically poor argument from you in the healthcare section. I could use the same logic to argue that, if we define murder to be a human right, society could conscript people into being police officers, which would be slavery. This is obviously a stupid argument, and it's equally stupid applied to healthcare; the government can just pay people to be doctors.
As I said in the post, a right not to be murdered means that it is permissible to use force to prevent murder or to punish it. It doesn't mean a right to have someone prevent other people from murdering you. You are assuming that all human rights are positive rights.
Except that's not how government works. One way or another, the involvement of government means coercion, otherwise government would be unnecessary. Think of eminent domain. "You won't sell us your house at our price? Very well, we will take it from you."
Remember, every law is ultimately enforced by the threat of jail and death. If you aren't willing to kill people to enforce a law, it shouldn't be a law. When the government mandates the right to health care, it will be under their conditions, not the doctors and nurses. Lawyers are told by courts to provide free legal service at the court's discretion as a condition of being licensed as lawyers. Emergency rooms are not allowed to turn anyone away if they can't pay, and I would not be surprised if doctors have similar conditions attached to being reimbursed by government medical programs. (In the US; I don't know about other countries. And I may have some details wrong.)
This is just the old "taxation is extortion" argument. Perhaps valid, but irrelevant to healthcare, since as I explained, it applies equally to anything the government does.
Governments don't generally "just pay" market rates for what they want. They attach conditions which private players can't; coercion is always implied one way or another. You admit that's a universal government trait but dismiss it as irrelevant. Why?
"how anyone could know" is a concept in that great old book, "How to Lie with Statistics." The examples are dated, the author has been disgraced, but the concepts remain excellent.
It's a good book — our kids read it pretty young. After one of the presidential elections I noticed a story claiming fraud, with evidence nine states where the exit polls didn't fit the results. I showed it to my daughter who correctly spotted the problem.
On your medical thing, "If we interpret the right to healthcare similarly, it becomes the right to receive medical care from anyone willing to provide it to you" I think your niche case is more common than you think and because it's a regulated industry, you don't have any alternatives, i.e. if NO doctor will provide you X, AND legally a doctor can, then there is a strong case to be made for compelled non discriminatory service pricing that says "As part of your government granted license / monopoly, you WILL provide said service if requested and the person can pay fair market rate", i.e. if I want abortion pills you WILL prescribe them and not charge me any more than you would to prescribe any other prescription such as blood pressure, i.e. a standard doctor visit. This is no different that local water utilities must subscribe you as a customer, etc as long as you pay, they don't get to object because you are Muslim or charge you more.
You run into this problem all the time with doctors refusing to provide appropriate treatments because they personally object from benzodiazepines to desoxyn to codeine to vaccines to opiates and likewise STD tests, MRIs, or a big one locally here, a drug cocktail to end your life. Here doctor assisted suicide was passed nearly a decade ago and we have less than four dozen a year in the entire state (for comparison, a recent report from Canada during the same timeframe shows 5% of all deaths per annum due to assisted suicide) because you can't find doctors to sign off on it as the state requires two doctors to agree, single doctor objections are permanent bars (as they have to register their opinion with the state), and doctors can object purely for moral or religious reasons ... plus being a highly conservative state the doctors face reputational pressures to say no.
It is certainly true that some concepts bandied about do not have, or are not given, to precise meaning. But there are concepts that once had fairly precise meaning, and have changed or been changed by interested political contingents over time.
Take "equality" and the closely related "rights". It used to mean, quite precisely, "equality before the law." My equal right was trial by a judge and/or jury. This soon was twisted by some into "I get an equal amount of stuff as my neighbor, for that is my right." More recently, my right is to do whatever the hell I please, where I please, when I please, and perhaps already to whom I please. Currently, we seem to have a conflation of "a right to be free of government interference with speech" with "I have a right to disrupt your activities."
Watch your dictionary: Somebody is trying to mess with it to cloud your thinking.
Even a negative right, such as the right not to be killed, imposes an obligation on others — not to kill you. Negative rights don't impose an obligation on another to do something, just to not do some things.
Deliberate ambiguity in these claims enables the advocates to define and/or measure them however they wish. That is the point. Yes indeed we should ask what they mean and what are worthwhile measurements. It reminds me of performance standards for jobs.
You write: "Warming implies more extreme highs, fewer extreme lows, a pattern that can be seen in the IPCC reports. "
This is somewhat of a non-sequitur. Hurricanes may become more frequent and more powerful in part because of warming temperatures, but they are not "extreme highs".
This is in response to a statement about extreme weather events, not extreme temperature events: "Climate change will cause more extreme weather events."
I am not a meteorologist, let alone a climate forecaster. I certainly couldn't tell you how extreme weather events relate to temperature. But I am sure it's not as simple as trading in one type of extreme event for another, in precisely the same quantity.
You haven't established that the frequency and severity of extreme weather events won't increase - or even the weaker claim that the number of humans exposed to such events will increase, with extreme climate events tending moving to currently highly populated locales - ones people moved to because they were lower risk before the changes.
Highs and lows were a statement about temperature. The quote I was responding to referred to "extreme weather events," and a heat wave or a cold wave is an extreme weather event. So is a hurricane.
I not only did not say that it is "as simple as trading in one type of extreme event for another, in precisely the same quantity," the point of the post was that that statement would be meaningless since there is no common measure of "extreme weather event" to define what quantities are the same. You are not only ignoring the text of my post you are ignoring the title.
You seem to have somehow missed my entire argument, which is that "the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will increase" is not false but meaningless, like the statement "I am taller than I am old." Some kinds of extreme weather events will increase, some will decrease, and there is no natural measure of what counts as an extreme weather event that can be used to produce a total. If any hurricane is an extreme weather event then the IPCC projects them to become less frequent, if only a category 4 or 5 counts it projects them to become more frequent. If we define a heat wave or cold wave as extreme if it is more than 10°C above or below average then extremes of that sort probably become less common.
What is your definition of "extreme weather event" that can be applied to heat waves, cold waves, rainfall, hurricanes, ...?
This sounds like a semantics argument. We all speak in shorthand because being precise in everything we say would not be practicable. And I do believe understanding the underlying assumptions we are making that may not be true is important.
You define an extreme weather event as a heat wave or a cold wave and then make an argument based on your definition. Someone else could reasonably understand an extreme weather event to be a weather event that, in a short period of time, causes (or would cause, if there were infrastructure or population in the vicinity) significant economic damage--this is closer to how I understand that term.
So, I agree with you that it all depends on how you define extreme weather event and that it would be more useful to clarify what was meant, particularly to people who might interpret it as meaning the increase in the number of heat and cold waves. Where I disagree is that it is meaningless to make the statement. Even without a universally agreed definition for a term, using it can still impart useful information. For example, I can make the statement that the economic assumption that people will act in their own best interests is fundamentally flawed because many, if not most, people don't know their own best interests and you can correctly criticize this statement because "own best interests" is ambiguous, and yet, I still believe it is a not meaningless statement.
So what does the statement that extreme weather events are increasing mean? Any hurricane over populated areas causes significant economic damage — do all such count as extreme events? Both heat waves and cold waves kill people and crops — why doesn't that meet your definition? How do you decide what counts in order add it up?
I didn't define an extreme weather event as a heat wave or cold wave. I argued that those could be classified as extreme weather events, with no obvious line between extreme and not quite extreme, as an example of the meaninglessness of the claim.
As part of my Chartertopia project, I spent a fair amount of time trying to define "animal rights", and the "best" I could come up with was anything less cruel than life in the wild, ie, being eaten alive by a predator or starving to death from an injury such as a broken leg or wing. It's still not very subjective. Cutting off a dog's leg for sport qualifies as animal cruelty, or cock fights with metal spurs, or any animal fights from which escape is impossible. On the other hand, do mama dogs rub puppy noses in their urine to train them to pee away from home? Do wild dogs always eat live prey?
It was fun wondering what qualifies as murder. A wolf attacking a sheep is normal; what about a wolf attacking another wolf? No, they do that too. Is a rancher killing wolves punishing sheep murderers, or does he have to train sheep to do that? Male monkeys and lions and no doubt other animals have been known to kill new mate's offspring, presumably because they have some other male's genes. Are aphids slaves of ants?
Human rights seem pretty easy in comparison. It does not include forcing others to provide for you. But then what about the adult who walks by a baby crawling into a road?
The problem there is you are effectively anthropomorphizing certain animals, i.e. mammals and suggesting they have rights at all by even including them in a conservation about rights. They don't, objects don't have rights. You can no more deprive a dog of it's rights than a rock, there is no more moral difference between carving your initials on a tree or the chest of a cat.
Granting human rights to minor children is a recent invention and TBH I'm not sold on it yet, I go back and forth. Invalids, etc. are an easier case as they had rights and generally we agree rights once granted are only terminated on death but minor children especially under puberty is a hard one to square.
Please don't be so silly. "Animal rights" has a well-defined public meaning which does not look favorably on carving your initials on the chest of a cat.
Fads come and go, there is no moral basis to give objects rights. The public doesn't look favorable on litter either but we don't give sidewalks rights.
Well, you go ahead and carve your initials into every stray cat and dog in your neighborhood, brag about it, be proud of it, post flyers on every utility pole, and get back to us for how well that works out for you.
“ I doubt that most people who use the slogan intend that implication but what else can it mean? “
It can also mean that taxpayers are obligated to pay for voluntary health care for everyone, without requiring any specific person to be the provider. This is a bit of an improvement, as it merely disincentivizes income rather than disincentivizing learning anything about helping other people. But yeah, rights are one side of the coin, obligations are the other.
"For another example of an ambiguous use of “rights,” consider the claim that everyone has a right to marry. Taken literally, that would mean that, if no woman is willing to marry me, one may be compelled to. "
This made me laugh a lot. I'm curious if you intended it to be humorous! Brilliant analogy.
“the number of extreme cold events probably goes down by more than the number of extreme hot goes down, reducing the total. “
If they are both going down, the total will definitely be reduced. Probably what was intended was, “the number of extreme cold events probably goes down by more than the number of extreme hot goes [up], reducing the total. “
“A week every year in an elite medical facility being tested for everything that could possibly go wrong.”
This is also an ambiguous good. There is a point where the increased risk of iatrogenic harm rises faster than the risk of other illness falls. Taleb conjectures that this effect plays a part in the fact that there seems to be only a small correlation between health and access to healthcare after a very minimal amount of access is surpassed.
I briefly worked in a hospital, and the biggest issue they were facing was infections people got from being in the hospital. That's when I learned that a significant number of people in the hospital would actually be better off going home or never going to the hospital, despite actually having a need for treatment for some kind of ailment. Obviously the hospital's stance was that they needed to reduce the infections, rather than turn people away. The biggest change - denying people catheters, including when patients requested to have one. This alone made a substantial difference in the outcome of patients. Denying "care" was the best thing for their health.
"What people actually mean by a living wage, as best I can tell, is a wage at which they can imagine themselves living a tolerable life."
I have come to the conclusion that there is not point in trying to understand how people live with less than a third or more than three times more of what I earn. If this were applicable to most of us, I guess a living wage is one third of what whoever says it is earning himself.
An uncharacteristically poor argument from you in the healthcare section. I could use the same logic to argue that, if we define murder to be a human right, society could conscript people into being police officers, which would be slavery. This is obviously a stupid argument, and it's equally stupid applied to healthcare; the government can just pay people to be doctors.
As I said in the post, a right not to be murdered means that it is permissible to use force to prevent murder or to punish it. It doesn't mean a right to have someone prevent other people from murdering you. You are assuming that all human rights are positive rights.
Except that's not how government works. One way or another, the involvement of government means coercion, otherwise government would be unnecessary. Think of eminent domain. "You won't sell us your house at our price? Very well, we will take it from you."
Remember, every law is ultimately enforced by the threat of jail and death. If you aren't willing to kill people to enforce a law, it shouldn't be a law. When the government mandates the right to health care, it will be under their conditions, not the doctors and nurses. Lawyers are told by courts to provide free legal service at the court's discretion as a condition of being licensed as lawyers. Emergency rooms are not allowed to turn anyone away if they can't pay, and I would not be surprised if doctors have similar conditions attached to being reimbursed by government medical programs. (In the US; I don't know about other countries. And I may have some details wrong.)
This is just the old "taxation is extortion" argument. Perhaps valid, but irrelevant to healthcare, since as I explained, it applies equally to anything the government does.
Why is a valid universal argument irrelevant?
Governments don't generally "just pay" market rates for what they want. They attach conditions which private players can't; coercion is always implied one way or another. You admit that's a universal government trait but dismiss it as irrelevant. Why?
"how anyone could know" is a concept in that great old book, "How to Lie with Statistics." The examples are dated, the author has been disgraced, but the concepts remain excellent.
It's a good book — our kids read it pretty young. After one of the presidential elections I noticed a story claiming fraud, with evidence nine states where the exit polls didn't fit the results. I showed it to my daughter who correctly spotted the problem.
On your medical thing, "If we interpret the right to healthcare similarly, it becomes the right to receive medical care from anyone willing to provide it to you" I think your niche case is more common than you think and because it's a regulated industry, you don't have any alternatives, i.e. if NO doctor will provide you X, AND legally a doctor can, then there is a strong case to be made for compelled non discriminatory service pricing that says "As part of your government granted license / monopoly, you WILL provide said service if requested and the person can pay fair market rate", i.e. if I want abortion pills you WILL prescribe them and not charge me any more than you would to prescribe any other prescription such as blood pressure, i.e. a standard doctor visit. This is no different that local water utilities must subscribe you as a customer, etc as long as you pay, they don't get to object because you are Muslim or charge you more.
You run into this problem all the time with doctors refusing to provide appropriate treatments because they personally object from benzodiazepines to desoxyn to codeine to vaccines to opiates and likewise STD tests, MRIs, or a big one locally here, a drug cocktail to end your life. Here doctor assisted suicide was passed nearly a decade ago and we have less than four dozen a year in the entire state (for comparison, a recent report from Canada during the same timeframe shows 5% of all deaths per annum due to assisted suicide) because you can't find doctors to sign off on it as the state requires two doctors to agree, single doctor objections are permanent bars (as they have to register their opinion with the state), and doctors can object purely for moral or religious reasons ... plus being a highly conservative state the doctors face reputational pressures to say no.
It is certainly true that some concepts bandied about do not have, or are not given, to precise meaning. But there are concepts that once had fairly precise meaning, and have changed or been changed by interested political contingents over time.
Take "equality" and the closely related "rights". It used to mean, quite precisely, "equality before the law." My equal right was trial by a judge and/or jury. This soon was twisted by some into "I get an equal amount of stuff as my neighbor, for that is my right." More recently, my right is to do whatever the hell I please, where I please, when I please, and perhaps already to whom I please. Currently, we seem to have a conflation of "a right to be free of government interference with speech" with "I have a right to disrupt your activities."
Watch your dictionary: Somebody is trying to mess with it to cloud your thinking.
One's "right" should not impose an obligation on another. Another way of saying this is that you can't have competing rights.
Even a negative right, such as the right not to be killed, imposes an obligation on others — not to kill you. Negative rights don't impose an obligation on another to do something, just to not do some things.
Deliberate ambiguity in these claims enables the advocates to define and/or measure them however they wish. That is the point. Yes indeed we should ask what they mean and what are worthwhile measurements. It reminds me of performance standards for jobs.
You write: "Warming implies more extreme highs, fewer extreme lows, a pattern that can be seen in the IPCC reports. "
This is somewhat of a non-sequitur. Hurricanes may become more frequent and more powerful in part because of warming temperatures, but they are not "extreme highs".
This is in response to a statement about extreme weather events, not extreme temperature events: "Climate change will cause more extreme weather events."
I am not a meteorologist, let alone a climate forecaster. I certainly couldn't tell you how extreme weather events relate to temperature. But I am sure it's not as simple as trading in one type of extreme event for another, in precisely the same quantity.
You haven't established that the frequency and severity of extreme weather events won't increase - or even the weaker claim that the number of humans exposed to such events will increase, with extreme climate events tending moving to currently highly populated locales - ones people moved to because they were lower risk before the changes.
Highs and lows were a statement about temperature. The quote I was responding to referred to "extreme weather events," and a heat wave or a cold wave is an extreme weather event. So is a hurricane.
I not only did not say that it is "as simple as trading in one type of extreme event for another, in precisely the same quantity," the point of the post was that that statement would be meaningless since there is no common measure of "extreme weather event" to define what quantities are the same. You are not only ignoring the text of my post you are ignoring the title.
You seem to have somehow missed my entire argument, which is that "the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will increase" is not false but meaningless, like the statement "I am taller than I am old." Some kinds of extreme weather events will increase, some will decrease, and there is no natural measure of what counts as an extreme weather event that can be used to produce a total. If any hurricane is an extreme weather event then the IPCC projects them to become less frequent, if only a category 4 or 5 counts it projects them to become more frequent. If we define a heat wave or cold wave as extreme if it is more than 10°C above or below average then extremes of that sort probably become less common.
What is your definition of "extreme weather event" that can be applied to heat waves, cold waves, rainfall, hurricanes, ...?
This sounds like a semantics argument. We all speak in shorthand because being precise in everything we say would not be practicable. And I do believe understanding the underlying assumptions we are making that may not be true is important.
You define an extreme weather event as a heat wave or a cold wave and then make an argument based on your definition. Someone else could reasonably understand an extreme weather event to be a weather event that, in a short period of time, causes (or would cause, if there were infrastructure or population in the vicinity) significant economic damage--this is closer to how I understand that term.
So, I agree with you that it all depends on how you define extreme weather event and that it would be more useful to clarify what was meant, particularly to people who might interpret it as meaning the increase in the number of heat and cold waves. Where I disagree is that it is meaningless to make the statement. Even without a universally agreed definition for a term, using it can still impart useful information. For example, I can make the statement that the economic assumption that people will act in their own best interests is fundamentally flawed because many, if not most, people don't know their own best interests and you can correctly criticize this statement because "own best interests" is ambiguous, and yet, I still believe it is a not meaningless statement.
So what does the statement that extreme weather events are increasing mean? Any hurricane over populated areas causes significant economic damage — do all such count as extreme events? Both heat waves and cold waves kill people and crops — why doesn't that meet your definition? How do you decide what counts in order add it up?
I didn't define an extreme weather event as a heat wave or cold wave. I argued that those could be classified as extreme weather events, with no obvious line between extreme and not quite extreme, as an example of the meaninglessness of the claim.
As part of my Chartertopia project, I spent a fair amount of time trying to define "animal rights", and the "best" I could come up with was anything less cruel than life in the wild, ie, being eaten alive by a predator or starving to death from an injury such as a broken leg or wing. It's still not very subjective. Cutting off a dog's leg for sport qualifies as animal cruelty, or cock fights with metal spurs, or any animal fights from which escape is impossible. On the other hand, do mama dogs rub puppy noses in their urine to train them to pee away from home? Do wild dogs always eat live prey?
It was fun wondering what qualifies as murder. A wolf attacking a sheep is normal; what about a wolf attacking another wolf? No, they do that too. Is a rancher killing wolves punishing sheep murderers, or does he have to train sheep to do that? Male monkeys and lions and no doubt other animals have been known to kill new mate's offspring, presumably because they have some other male's genes. Are aphids slaves of ants?
Human rights seem pretty easy in comparison. It does not include forcing others to provide for you. But then what about the adult who walks by a baby crawling into a road?
The problem there is you are effectively anthropomorphizing certain animals, i.e. mammals and suggesting they have rights at all by even including them in a conservation about rights. They don't, objects don't have rights. You can no more deprive a dog of it's rights than a rock, there is no more moral difference between carving your initials on a tree or the chest of a cat.
Granting human rights to minor children is a recent invention and TBH I'm not sold on it yet, I go back and forth. Invalids, etc. are an easier case as they had rights and generally we agree rights once granted are only terminated on death but minor children especially under puberty is a hard one to square.
Please don't be so silly. "Animal rights" has a well-defined public meaning which does not look favorably on carving your initials on the chest of a cat.
Fads come and go, there is no moral basis to give objects rights. The public doesn't look favorable on litter either but we don't give sidewalks rights.
Well, you go ahead and carve your initials into every stray cat and dog in your neighborhood, brag about it, be proud of it, post flyers on every utility pole, and get back to us for how well that works out for you.
That's irrelevant to the morality of it which what your OP was about.
Lighten up, Francis. It's a thought experiment, not a proposed constitutional amendment or UN resolution.
“ I doubt that most people who use the slogan intend that implication but what else can it mean? “
It can also mean that taxpayers are obligated to pay for voluntary health care for everyone, without requiring any specific person to be the provider. This is a bit of an improvement, as it merely disincentivizes income rather than disincentivizing learning anything about helping other people. But yeah, rights are one side of the coin, obligations are the other.
"For another example of an ambiguous use of “rights,” consider the claim that everyone has a right to marry. Taken literally, that would mean that, if no woman is willing to marry me, one may be compelled to. "
This made me laugh a lot. I'm curious if you intended it to be humorous! Brilliant analogy.
Typo?
“the number of extreme cold events probably goes down by more than the number of extreme hot goes down, reducing the total. “
If they are both going down, the total will definitely be reduced. Probably what was intended was, “the number of extreme cold events probably goes down by more than the number of extreme hot goes [up], reducing the total. “
Thank you for pointing it out. I have now fixed it.