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steven0461 comments on A Challenge for LessWrong - Less Wrong
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I mean that they maintain practices, justified on scientific grounds, that are blatantly illogical.
Laying aside that blinding and randomization aren't really necessary for statistical studies, I'd much rather see a study that compared the relative amounts of blood contaminated with sexually transmitted diseases across several countries with similar demographics and cultural trends, some of which refused to accept blood from gay men.
But we don't always get the evidence we want, sadly, and so we must make do with what we have, much as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services must.
Or, we can ignore the evidence entirely and look at whether HHS is even being consistent, which is an easier question to answer definitively. The current policy is that any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 is banned from donating blood for life. It is also current policy that any woman who has had sex with such a man is banned from donating blood for the next year.
I will leave identifying this failure of rationality as an exercise for the reader.
If you refuse to participate in or associate with any activity that your government has illogical rules about, not much will be left.
I'm not proposing a boycott of blood drives. Just that they may not be something a community of rationalists should endorse as rational.
'Giving blood' and 'the way blood donation is managed' are very different things, and there's only weak reason AFAICS to expect their rationality-values (in the rather different senses of 'rational' that apply to individual actions and to institutional processes) to be correlated.
Indeed. If a hypothetical blood boycott protesting these rules would do more harm, on balance, than alternative means of promoting public health policy reform, then giving blood is good thing to do, and our community should endorse giving blood — even though we might gnash our teeth at the apparent endorsement of discrimination or irrationality. We can clear our collective conscience, if need be, by explicitly noting that we think giving blood is a good idea even though there are problems with the way it is collected.
Similarly, if you want to donate a little money to a school in a poor community, and the only existing school teaches silly religious stuff in addition to valuable skills, you should probably still want to donate to that school.
See also: Your Price for Joining
Agreed. I would not propose a blood boycott, and I would likewise endorse giving blood, with no teeth-gnashing involved. I would even (reluctantly) endorse the current FDA standards if doing so could be expected to increase the amount of blood donated in a non-trivial way. What I would not do is endorse the current FDA standards as rational, especially in the context of a discussion about doing rational things.
If my objective is to promote rationality (and achieving ends I value ethically is also a consideration), I would want to instead endorse some activity or organization that is approximately as fuzzy but lacks current controversy over its willingness to adhere to scientific standards, noting that said controversy is still bad (given this particular objective) regardless of whether it is warranted. If I am concerned about the public perception and adoption of rationality, I should maximize for that value.
That the controversy centers around a standard that is both sub-optimal and needlessly discriminatory is merely gravy.
So, just to check, you're concerned that endorsement of giving blood will inevitably blend over into, or be equivocated with, endorsement of the way blood donation works. Is that a fair description?
That's nothing like what WrongBot said.
It's not something I've specifically said, but I don't think it's an unreasonable inference from my stated position. It is also mostly true.
Yes, with the nitpick that I would say "likely" instead of "inevitably." In terms of expected outcome, the two are similar.