What Ratio of Y to X Should Determine Life-Saving Decisions?

  • Thread starter BicycleTree
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In summary, the previous "ratio" was a little unclear and vague. Just what is "worth," after all? And Monique's objection about fractional options holds. So here is the new question: If you have the ability, through distributing money and manpower, to save x lives from terrorists or y lives from other causes, how great does the ratio y:x need to be before you are undecided which group of lives to save?

X, Y in order (see below)

  • 7, 13

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 6, 14

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 5, 15

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 4, 16

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 3, 17

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 2, 18

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    10
  • #36
1:infinity? You mean if given the power to either save 1 life from terrorism, or to save all prematurely ended lives from other causes, you would save the life from terrorism? That's pretty sick matt.
 
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  • #37
mattmns said:
Well I thought I had a write-in vote, but it was not exact. I will vote just to make you happy, although my choice would be much higher [tex]1: \infty [/tex] or so.


nice to know my life aint worth a f***.
 
  • #38
Well, you cannot do anything to prevent terrorism, you can, however, not smoke, eat healthy, etc.
 
  • #39
you can't do much to prevent hurricanes, earthquakes , epidemics etc...
 
  • #40
I guess I should have definied my ratio.

My ratio is: self inflicted deaths (ie, unhealty lifestyle), vs things that cannot be controlled (terrorism, hurricanes, stray gun bullet, things that cause a person to die when they would have lived for a much longer time, that were not self inflicted).
 
  • #41
BicycleTree said:
Also, "people statistically favor death from obesity as opposed to death from terrorism" is no conclusion of mine.

This is what you are prodding us to say; why else would the poll be skewed like this? You're basically asking us how many obesity-related deaths it takes to be equivalent to a terrorist-related death. And that's a sick, sick question. Nobody wants to weigh lives.
 
  • #42
mattmns said:
Well, you cannot do anything to prevent terrorism, you can, however, not smoke, eat healthy, etc.
Careful, watch his original wording. He's trying to get you to compare deaths due to terrorism to ALL other forms of death, which would include other forms of homicide, casualties of war, negligence, natural disasters, suicide, famine, disease, inattention to your health, a genetic predisposition, a chronic ailment since childhood, occupational injury, etc. He has not asked about preventable vs non-preventable, nor has he asked you to compare the value of any individual life; he has asked you to determine how to allocate funds for preventing one cause of death vs. EVERY other cause of death. He has not provided any reasonable answer choice to fit with his question, indeed, has not even provided a reasonable explanation for the options he chose to include. He is also not asking about newsworthiness of the deaths, yet we all know his agenda is to use this poll to justify his statements on newsworthiness, which is what most of us saw through the moment this poll appeared.
 
  • #43
BicycleTree said:
If you have the ability, through distributing money and manpower, to save x lives from terrorists or y lives from other causes, how great does the ratio y:x need to be before you are undecided which group of lives to save?
Oh, here's something that's confusing. Here you define your ratios as Y:X but your poll says X:Y. Which is it?
 
  • #44
Yeah I did not notice that the first time I read the thread, that is why I defined my ratio.

edit... hmm now I am confused lol!

Here is my vote: I would save 1 live that could have been prevented over 100000000... that were self inflicted.
 
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  • #45
As long as we haven't voted in the poll, we can continue to argue obesity (that is, self-inflicted)- vs terrorist-related deaths. This is indeed how it started out as..
 
  • #46
Knavish said:
This is what you are prodding us to say; why else would the poll be skewed like this? You're basically asking us how many obesity-related deaths it takes to be equivalent to a terrorist-related death. And that's a sick, sick question. Nobody wants to weigh lives.
Agreed. And he's done it all through very tricky wording so as to entrap you no matter what you do. He sets up a ratio under the pretense that it's to allocate money and manpower, as if you're voting based on ratio of fund allocation, but then goes on to say that it's actually a ratio of lives to determine all-or-nothing efforts to save those lives, which of course is contradictory to his claim that this is a real-life situation that people have to face in allocated funding, because in real life, it's not all-or-none, you can choose to allocate proportions of funding according to relative risk of death and projected benefit of saving lives. For example, you can decide that all the money in the world won't stop someone from over eating, but with money and manpower, you can fight terrorists. Or, you can decide that some money into obesity research, some money into police forces, some money into anti-terrorism task forces, etc...will make a dent into each of those. Or you can prioritize and say terrorism is an immediate threat that we need to stop now before it gets worse, obesity is a gradual threat, so we can postpone funding that until we deal with the immediate threat, or this particular problem isn't claiming many lives, so we should put greater funding toward something claiming more lives. Yet, NONE of this goes toward the newsworthiness of any form of death.
 
  • #47
I don't see what is wrong with this thread at all. It is a very valid question. The timing might be not have been the greatest but it is still a very reasonable thought problem.
I have read, I am not sure where, a similar question just with a different situation.

You are at the switch of a railway track and there is a train comming that has lost it's breaks. on the one fork of the tracks there are X pedestrians crossing and on the other there are Y railway workers doing minor repair on the tracks.
Given that the railway workers know the risks involved of working on the tracks, which way do you direct the train?

I am quite surprised that most of you are acting so hostile to BT. It is a perfectly reasonable question that, especially given the anonimity of the internet, should be anwserable truthfully by everone.
 
  • #48
Physics is Phun said:
I don't see what is wrong with this thread at all. It is a very valid question. The timing might be not have been the greatest but it is still a very reasonable thought problem.
First, if you read the question and the answer choices carefully, you'll see it's not a valid question because it is heavily biased in a single direction. Second, it's not just an issue of timing, but the context of BTs remarks leading up to this poll.

I am quite surprised that most of you are acting so hostile to BT. It is a perfectly reasonable question that, especially given the anonimity of the internet, should be anwserable truthfully by everone.
To understand the sentiments being expressed, you'll need to follow the train of argument from the thread on the London explosions (note BT's comments and the responses he received): https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=673668#post673668

And then the first version of this poll, to which he refers in the opening post here, indicating his arguments in the two are not mutually exclusive:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=81505

Some people also develop a pattern of behavior such that one can predict their intent is not sheer curiosity when starting up a thread on a controversial topic, especially when it includes a clearly biased poll.
 
  • #49
Quite so; there is a natural conclusion to arrive at from your answer in this poll. But I let you draw the conclusion.

a clearly biased poll
The only bias in the poll is that it does not include ratios greater than 10:10, which you have agreed is a negligible bias.
 
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  • #50
It seems to me that this poll is starting to look dubious. it is almost as if one can assign a value or watever to anothers life. NO ONE has that RIGHT.
 
  • #51
kaos said:
It seems to me that this poll is starting to look dubious. it is almost as if one can assign a value or watever to anothers life. NO ONE has that RIGHT.
Maybe nobody has the right, but the fact is that some people have the power. There are cases where some people have to make that kind of choice.
 
  • #52
BT your comments in the london thread were not in good taste at all. Although I don't entirely disagree with you, it is not the place to be making comment like that.
 
  • #53
You would rather that such comments be made far away from what they are relevant to? If I am saying that excessive regard is being paid to a certain topic, where else to place that comment than in a discussion of that topic?
 
  • #54
Excessive regard? come on! Who care how many people have died. It is important to a lot of people on PF, especially the ones in england. what do you care how much regard people are paying. Would you be complaining if someone just posted a thread that their mom, or dog, or even fish died? No. You console the person. You don't tell them, "oh well, there are plenty of other dogs out there". Again, I am not disagreing with you, it is just not appropriate to post such provoking things in a thread specifically made for keeping us informed of the situation, and talking to people who may have had people they know hurt or worse.
You talk about looking at the big picture, but you fail to see the small picture which is helping the (few by your standards) people who this attack has affected, recover.
 
  • #55
The attack directly affected nobody on these forums. To the best of my knowledge, nobody on these forums knew anyone who died.

One hundred people died of cancer very recently.
 
  • #56
Yes, but the attacks indicate potential to affect some on the board. Moreover, it is indecent and rude the trivialize the attacks and the deaths as you did.

Edit: Please get back to obesity instead of cancer; this is what you initially argued for. By changing the topic to cancer--a death from which is completely different from death by obesity--you are twisting my words.
 
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  • #57
Are the one hundred cancer deaths which happened in the USA in the past 40 minutes trivial?
 
  • #58
Edited, even before I saw your last post.
 
  • #59
BicycleTree said:
You would rather that such comments be made far away from what they are relevant to? If I am saying that excessive regard is being paid to a certain topic, where else to place that comment than in a discussion of that topic?

You should remember that this is not a newspaper, where it is up to an editor to determine how many column inches should be devoted to a particular issue.

The amount of regard which a subject receives on a message board such as this is purely reflective of the amount of interest it gets. It's self regulating. If a topic appears which is not worthy of discussion, or which nobody cares about, it kills itself.

I choose not to comment on many of the issues in, say, the Astronomy, or Metaphysics forums on this site. They do not interest or concern me. I do not place posts there saying "this topic does not interest or concern me", and I certainly do not attempt to tell those present that, statistically, their issue is not worthy of the amount of discussion it has received. I do not understand why you feel the need to tell people that the topic they are discussing is not as important as you think they're making it out to be?

A thread was recently started by a member wanting to discuss some personal issues. He received over four pages of discussion on this matter. NOBODY told him that, say, African poverty was more important than his problem, even though I'm sure that everyone (himself included) would agree that it was. Perhaps, instead of trying to make everyone see "the big picture", you would benefit from either trying to see some smaller ones, or (alternatively) keeping yourself away from matters which you can't contribute anything to.

If the reason people have not voted in your poll isn't because they are not interested in it, or even think it's worthwhile, then perhaps it's because they were offended or disgusted by your thoughtless comments elsewhere.
 
  • #60
Actually, if you look back to the OP you see I am not focused solely on obesity-related deaths.


Edit: Brewnog, the difference between this and other focuses of attention is that this one is highly political and therefore important.

And you know, I have asked a question recently.
 
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  • #61
BicycleTree said:
Edit: Brewnog, the difference between this and other focuses of attention is that this one is highly political and therefore important.

So what's the problem with the amount of discussion it received then?

BicycleTree said:
And you know, I have asked a question recently.

Good for you, but I think you missed the point entirely. I'm sure that anyone who is interested in it will add their comments. I will resist the temptation to try and tell these people that they're wasting their time discussing it, and should instead be discussing the price of crude oil, or the suicide bomb which has just gone off in Iraq, killing 20.
 
  • #62
So what's the problem with the amount of discussion it received then?
There is no problem with the amount of discussion that the question of the amount of discussion of terrorist actions with low body count is receiving is receiving. The way you phrased it, that seemed to be what you were referring to; possibly you misinterpreted what I said.

Jumping to what you probably meant to be talking about, the problem with the discussion of the terrorist actions with low body count is that it makes these things seem more important on the large scale than they really are--not that each individual death is not important, which it is--and encourages drastic military action for a threat that is not as large as it seems.


100 people died of cancer in the USA in the past 40 minutes.
 
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  • #63
On behalf of everyone who was disgusted by your comments, I will accept that as a full apology.

Thanks.
 
  • #64
I think you merely misinterpreted my post, twice.
 
  • #65
You largely focused on obesity-related deaths, and you know it. There was only a hint or two about other "causes"--these causes carefully left ambiguous. Anyway, it seems you shared a different view in the other post:
BicycleTree said:
..that non-nuclear terrorism is insignificant compared to larger, curable problems such as obesity..
Now you say:
BicycleTree said:
..there are reasons--terrorism being a cause much out of the victim's control being one of them--to view deaths from terrorism as somewhat more important than deaths from other causes..

My only point was that I can express more pity for those who die uncontrolled deaths than those who die controlled ones. And that's all I said, and all I implied--there are no statistics involved. Simply admit that your (impudent) attitude in the last post was wrong, and I will be fine.
 
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  • #66
Actually, the causes were not left ambiguous. I stated in the OP:
"Other deaths" are deaths to cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, accidents, pneumonia, etc.
The assumption about uncontrolled deaths is that an "other death" is often a preventable death.
 
  • #67
You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?
 
  • #68
What you said seemed pretty clear to me.
 
  • #69
If you think I have missed something, why don't you bring it up again? Odds are, I already consider it addressed under one of my points.
 
  • #70
Are you talking about the previous thread? That's the thread I'm talking about--the one in which you were mostly comparing obesity- with terrorist-related deaths. ANYWAY, I am so done with this. I think I've given you my views, and I have wasted way too much time on this. Sorry, but bye.
 

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