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OrphanWilde comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: OrphanWilde 01 August 2012 03:25PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 08 August 2012 05:09:55PM 0 points [-]

Being "about" health doesn't make it health. If I have a magical machine that produces an infinite number of bleggs, I can describe the state of bleggs as being infinite, but I still can't describe blegg machines as being in infinite number.

It matters. You're arguing that healthcare isn't a finite resource because allocation of healthcare could conceivably produce a non-finite amount of health. But it doesn't follow from that that healthcare is a non-finite resource. If we only have one Perfect Health Machine, a theoretical machine which enables clinical immortality, we -still- have to decide who gets to use it. If we decide to build another, that consumes finite resources. We can only have a finite number of Perfect Health Machines which can each only process a finite number of people in any finite amount of time. The potential for "infinite health", however one defines that, doesn't imply a potential for infinite healthcare.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 August 2012 10:40:49AM -1 points [-]

You argument rests on the claim that you can prevent valuable people from dying by allocating healthcare resources to them. If that's not something you believe I think I win the substance of argument and our further disagreement is about insignificant semantics.