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JoshuaZ comments on Is a Purely Rational World a Technologically Advanced World? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (24)
How many of those ambulance uses are of fairly old people? A lot of motor accidents occur for a fairly young cohort, so I'm not sure this is a great comparison. Still, the basic point seems strong.
Can you expand on your logic for this? Light rail has heavy upkeep costs.
I personally would have died at 20 without ambulance motorization, for instance, and I don't think I'm a 1 in 4000 outlier. Appendicitis doesn't always happen at a convenient time, nor is it always recognized promptly. Right there I'd guess we're talking over one in a thousand.
As for light rail, it does have costs. So do buses. The numbers I can find on buses put them ahead only wherever there is no existing rail system.
I would have been at least permanently brain-damaged, if not dead, without fast ambulances. Rapid response is the difference between recovering from a stroke and, well, not.
Yeah, the first thing I thought was to compare QALYs rather than number of lives, too. But then I thought that ambulances are more useful for ‘sudden’ emergencies such as accidents than for ‘slower’ ones such as cancer, and then maybe a higher fraction of ‘lives saved by ambulances’ are young, otherwise healthy people than apparently obvious.