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Elo comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: polymathwannabe 11 August 2015 01:24PM

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Comment author: James_Miller 11 August 2015 03:50:43PM 9 points [-]

Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.

Comment author: Elo 11 August 2015 11:12:43PM 4 points [-]

Several issues;

  1. I didn't think that many organs were needed.

  2. tissue typing is difficult and rare to find a match.

  3. this would probably discourage the creation of synthetic organs that would actually solve the problem without a need for removing the organs of other people.