Sorry what’s the inheritance logic here? Are you talking about life insurance or something? Otherwise, and again presuming the cure doesn’t work which seems absent from your assessment as a possibility, how would it affect someone’s inheritance?
My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.
That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
One problem is people selling their home to pay for snake oil, so their children now are not only orphan but also homeless.
Imagina an evil bank clerk on the door of a cancer center that says:
fake quote> There is a new promising [unverified] treatment that can save the life of your S.O. It's very expensive so you have to take a double mortgage on your home. You are very lucky, because today we are offering it with only a 49.99% interest rate. Do you love him/her?
Term life insurance really isn't expensive, and it's meant to take care of those you leave behind in an unfortunate event. Pay off some big bills so your partner isn't grieving AND homeless. Most of the people on this site are pretty well-off, and can/should afford an expense like this.
If you've got a 95% chance of death, take the pain pills and enjoy your final days. Don't bankrupt yourself and spend more time miserable, dying anyways.
I think this might be a US vs international thing then on the value of life insurance (typical payouts here are around $100k, 10% or more are rejected, and that policy would be around $10k a year). But nonetheless it’s the smallest/irrelevant part of my point.
The parent comment suggested taking an experimental drug would mean they couldn’t give their children inheritance, implying that the government might seize your assets or something.
I firmly disagree with the “take the death” argument made here, but I do respect the intellectual integrity of committing to your argument at least, and suspect we just hold extremely different moral perspectives.
Are you sure those numbers are right? People are paying up to $90k to get $100k? Where is this land? I need to open a business here.
In the US, you pay like $350/year (assuming you’re, like, 30-ish?) for about a half million dollar policy.
By the time you’re 60, you shouldn’t need that payout anymore. You should have enough savings to cover your funeral, plus whatever retirement plan you had anyways to care for the probably-just-one dependent at that point.
I feel like you’re imagining that you take a magic drug which cures you and you go home happy. In reality, the drug will have severe side effects in every case, making your final days worse. The chances of it working are already incredibly low. It is a significantly more brutal lottery than scratch tickets could ever hope to be.
When you have almost no time left, you focus on quality. Visit people you haven’t seen enough, do things you wanted to do, say things you meant to say. Take some pain meds to get through the worst of it. Memento mori.
I'm not in the startup scene or the US but I've come to understand this as 6 days a week of working 9am-9pm - typical hustle virtue-signalling nonsense and/or the latest move to exploit/shame/scare driven/desperate people to sacrifice their lives unsustainably for the wealth creation of others (and I take the comment you were replying to was criticising this as well).
Agreed this was well expressed, and I value this sort of reflection and cultural introspection, even if I lightly disagree with elements of the author's piece (that perhaps I'm wrongly overreading).
Per the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).
I agree with the statement that there is no singular truth. Everything, especially in politics, is a bunch of shit on both sides, where it’s often hard to understand what is better. Usually, the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle.
But many writers use hyperbole, exaggeration, and other literary techniques that push ideas to the extreme of one side; is that not pushing back on the idea that there is no singular truth?
Style is definitely not pointless, but I also would disagree with you that a painting carries only style and elegance and holds no meaning. I am often moved by a song by what it is trying to convey to me or the story it is describing. Again, without style, I would never listen to the song.
I do believe, though, that writers often put elegance instead of meaning into their writing for the sole purpose of getting popular. And this hurts our literature.
+ is not a unique convention. I have dynamic rewrite sets so that all mails with specific prefixe s go to my mailbox:
<my initials>-site-<companyname>@<my domain> go to my personal mailbox
<my partner's initials>-app-<appname>@<her domain> go to my partner's mailbox
<daughter initials>-account-<entity name>@<my domain> go to my daughter's account
Sure you could in theory set up the server side verification mecanism for these pattern too. I am just stating that the +suffix stuff is not the only way used.
Accepting a little exaggeration (“works” vs “works well”), for a segment, almost certainly.
Particularly when they know that people like the commenter above are making sure it ultimately “works” by covering the incompetence of their colleagues.
The comment you are replying to is in my view a superb observation of the challenge of maintaining quality against systemic pressures to appear to be performing.
Most senior leaders in organisations cannot (or care not to) measure quality. Few (outside big tech I assume but wouldn’t be surprised to also see overlook this?) are even usefully measuring benefits realisation tied back to activity (such as software releases).
What they can measure and are systemically incentivised for is “what does it take to get the approval of the next leader above me”, and most of the time a plausible report that the software has been delivered to/ahead of schedule is the real objective to achieve this goal.
That doesn’t mean morally motivated managers aren’t out there driving quality. But it is at odds with these org systems, at the detriment (or risk of detriment) of their own careers compared to peers who optimise more for what the system rewards, and at the expense of greater energy as they effectively have to hide their pursuit of better outcomes for the organisation under a veneer of performing as the organisation expects (that is, serve two goals simultaneously, one covert and one performative).
> The price of something and the value of something were never expected to be the same
While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].
Another interesting line of argument is to explore things that are valuable that don’t typically get a price: for example household labour, or love and friendship (at least directly: I’m sure a Friedman acolyte would reduce all relationships to exchange and reframe gifts and acts of love as investments).
As an aside for the parent comment: thanks for sharing this, it’s one of the top category of comments/quotes I’ve seen on HN in being useful, insightful, and challenging of conventional understanding in a way that improves understanding and future prediction.
Mainstream economists believe that value >= price. This is where economic surplus comes from. This is why trade is not zero sum, and it's why trade causes societies to get wealthier. Friendship and love fit into this framework just fine, as the price is $0, but the value is greater than $0.
How often is "You should pay me much more, it will make both of us wealthier" a winning argument when asking for a raise?
Trade very much is zero sum, at least some of the time. Prices are set by power disparities, not by abstract concepts of relative value.
One of the many problems with mainstream econ is that gloms together a whole set of unrelated interactions in a single crude concept of "price."
In reality share dealing, corporate wage bargaining, negotiations between farmers and supermarket chains, lemonade stands, and tourists haggling with craft vendors on vacation are all completely different kinds of interactions.
They end up with a price because they're mediated in currency, but their differences are far more interesting and economically revealing than their very superficial similarities.
Prices are set by supply and demand, which you may choose to label as "power" as a matter of a priori definition, and to some extent that will be a suitable label, but you would be throwing a way a whole deal of explanatory power by insisting on such a rhetorically loaded framing.
> How often is "You should pay me much more, it will make both of us wealthier" a winning argument when asking for a raise?
A great deal. If you don't pay me, I will quit, and you will be worse off, so it's a win-win proposition for you to give me a raise. That's what labor market competition is about.
> They end up with a price because they're mediated in currency, but their differences are far more interesting and economically revealing than their very superficial similarities.
Hence microeconomics, labor economics, financial economics, and the various other mainstream economics disciplines that do try to split those hairs.
Other theories of price setting (non-classical and non-marginalist) exist, for example the sample chapter of this book, which describes how the existence and prevalence of markup pricing was discovered independently several times over the past century.
I think we’re using different terms for value but I agree with your argument about comparative advantage and non zero sum trade, while also noting the other comments here that price is intended to correlate with marginal value in a suitably free market, to the degree that individual measures of value can be mediated through a price mechanism.
This is perhaps the broader point, which is that to the degree economics acknowledges non-priced value it’s a hand wave to “there’s some economic surplus here otherwise these people wouldn’t reach agreement to exchange”.
But to the degree that senses of value are the motivating factor behind economic exchange it’s oddly absent from the discussion. I get the reasons: philosophical inquiries about value and aesthetics are a lot more challenging to work through than concepts of utility reflected by measurable actions, but this goes to the overall point about the limitation and overreduction of current mainstream economics, and the criticism of people like Graeber of its politicised and somewhat arbitrary intellectual grounds.
To the degree mainstream economic reduction is useful to support understanding that’s fine - it absolutely allows reasoning and insight in many scenarios, especially microeconomics - but to the degree that decision-makers double down on it (especially macro) despite it being incomplete or absolutely wrong in certain environments and contexts because it promotes certain power structures and power plays that is highly problematic, especially when people jump to its defence out of misplaced loyalty to a school of expertise.
Note that in orthodox microeconomic theory, price is equal to the marginal value of the last exchanged unit. To use the above example of food:
> What's the value of food? If you have none you die, so the value is quit of high, but the price is much lower than that because there are many competing suppliers.
The first calories of the day, the ones that prevent you from dying, have a very high subjective value - but you pay them at the value of the 3000th calorie of the day, the extra drop of ketchup on your fries, which has a very little value.
And thus of course average value x volume is very different from (marginal value of last unit) x volume.
> While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].
For mainstream economics, this is true in a very specific technical sense; all averages lose information, and the "market average" is a very particular form of average that doesn't behave the way most people think of an average behaving—particularly, it is not like a mean, the normal "average" that people think of, that is sensitive to changes in any individual values, it is somewhat like a median in that it is insensitive to changes in existing values that do not cross the "average"; e.g., if you take an existing market for a commodity with a given clearing price, and reduce, by any amount, the value of the commodity to any proper subset of sellers who would sell at the current market clearing price, the market clearing price does not change. The assessment of value across the market has decreased, but the output of the particular averaging function performed by the market has not.
Reminds me of a problem I ran into once where someone had wanted unique but short codes as identifiers for relatively small counts, and picked a substring of a UUID:
> However, the overall takeaway was: Don’t use the MongoDB Increment value as a Unique Identifier.
However, the overall takeaway should be, as always: don't use MongoDB. Period. Every time I learn something new about it I'm baffled about why people continue to use it.
What would the world be like if an identity-associated (and seemingly ego-threatening to others) label was not a requirement to get access to a consumable good that made a material impact not only on an individual’s wellbeing, and life-time outcomes, but even for those who value this more, value to the economic and capital and social system.
Like imagine saying you need to spend thousands in proving to people that coffee is something that would help you get a pep in your step at 3pm on Wednesday to be able to get your morning latte.
Or to reframe this, why does everyone care so much, especially in an era when we’ve given up so many other values and multi-generational investments at times in a baby and bathwater sense.
If I were to say to you for the sake of argument that contextual clinical interpretation was no longer required, let’s say that we had a perfect test some other way, does part of you feel threatened or attached or defensive or argumentative?
The reason I ask is that your response leans very heavily into the importance of expertise and a specific form of knowledge, without showing the kind of subjective empathy for the experience of the people dealing with these challenges that I’m confident you have in spades given your profession.
And given your personal draw to scientific expertise (given your profession), and investment in building that expertise in yourself, and continued personal material and ego investment in that expertise being valued (and the school of thought that legitimises and makes that expertise worthy), as well as your clear intelligence and exploration and insights in this space, it seems an interesting question to ask whether in your deepest reflection there is any sense of conflict or tendency to bias, and how you consider if that shapes your views.
My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.
That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
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