Also note that, if you are a cryonics subscriber, deciding when and where to legally die is likely to increase the odds and reduce the cost of an optimal preservation procedure being used. Subject to the usual caveats, of course. Still beats starving yourself to death.
I got the impression that the anti-euthanasia guy is mostly repeating one argument -- that you can always remove pain, therefore the argument of killing people to prevent them from feeling unnecessary pain is always false.
My opinion is that this argument sounds nice and kinda convincing, but is completely unrelated to reality in healthcare. From what I have seen, hospitals for terminally ill patients are more or less torture chambers. There are countries where people are not even allowed to take marijuana to alleviate their pains, even when it is fucking o...
Scott Adams strikes me as being really bad at actually using rationality despite the name. I think the commenter PhantomPhlyer was spot on:
...Is it just me, or did Scott's conclusion not really conclude anything? It just said that, according to Scott's poll report (I haven't seen any poll, and consider one on emotional a topic such as this depends on how the question is worded), that 'most' Californians would favor death by doctor.
Was that the point of this whole tedious exercise? To repeat the same assumption he made at the start of this debate?
I also thi
Some criticisms of this piece
He generally assumes that the only form of suffering in death is pain. There are also nausea, vomiting, weakness and fatigue, restlessness, feelings of dread, feelings of humiliation, feelings of intense disgust (google "malignant wound" if you dare), severe shortness of breath, feelings of asphyxiation, and delirium.
Short of putting the patient into a coma, not all pain is treatable. Pain from nerve compression and bone compression are very hard to treat. Pain medications have side effects (eg delirium from morp
That's why the wedding cake example doesn't make sense in this context. You need special laws to regulate euthanasia.
Rather, wedding cakes are a single example of the more general idea "lwas have to prevent people from being forced to do things in general".
The law that forces here is the Oregon Equality Act. It prevents businesses from discriminating. It's not a law that legislates gay marriage that's the issue.
If you want to have effective laws than you have to target the right law. If you try to fix things at the wrong spot you add additional complexity.
When it comes to doctors there are laws about malpractice that do force doctors to do certain things. I think malpractice laws do have a right to exist but they shouldn't be too restrictive on what doctors can do. I think euthanasia laws should be written in a way that doesn't make it malpractice to avoid applying euthanasia.
The law that forces here is the Oregon Equality Act. It prevents businesses from discriminating. It's not a law that legislates gay marriage that's the issue.
A law which says that a gay marriage has to be treated like a straight marriage in one particular way is a gay marriage law. The law is just being made piecemeal and not labelled with "Gay Marriage Law" in the title, but it's still a gay marriage law.
Over at Scott Adams' Blog you can find a very fine example of using the 'Rationality Engine' to solve the social problem of assisted dying.