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by anon84873628 337 days ago
Please, you didn't just ask genuine innocent questions. You assumed many things about the OP's mindset then passed judgment on it.

You refer several times to argument and debate but you're tilting at windmills. The OP didn't make an argument. The closest thing is "Such is the state of medicine for profit, I guess." which is more of a resigned, bitter observation than overt indictment of capitalism.

If you want to use that as a prompt to say why no other funding model is better, then ok fine. But there are polite ways to do it which acknowledge the legitimacy of the person's feelings.

What's different about my comments is that they address things actually in the text and are in the spirit of bystander intervention and setting the tone of the commons.
1 comments
JohnMakin 337 days ago
I genuinely appreciate these responses because you state them much calmer and clearer than I can. To me, and I’m not accusing anyone here of this, these discussions feel really dishonest or at the very least completely unempathetic. I see in another comment this user says they feel sympathy, but clearly not empathy. and that’s fine to me! very few people have experienced what I have and will experience, in the specific way that I have, and my heart personally reaches out to anyone else that deals with some health condition that limits their quality of life or worse. I have, however, spent a ridiculous amount of time in the healthcare system, for a variety of reasons other than this specific topic, and know that this kind of callousness is more of a feature than a bug. To my mind, it’s also extraordinarily inefficient.

I’ll pose an argument to the rationalist crowd that I feel likes to think and feed deeply off these types of discussions:

say I’m destined to create the cure for cancer or bring about the singularity or whatever. I’m not, but let’s say I was. And I fall and hit my head one day and die because some billionaire decided that my condition wasn’t worth investing a miniscule fractional percentage of his wealth.

would that be wasteful?

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