this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Yeah, sorry for being vague. I'm not super knowledgeable about the field, just like if you asked me "how do we make deep sea welding safer?" I would maybe come up stuff like "put the welder in a shark cage" or "have them wear plated body armor so they don't get sucked in" or "make sure to train the diver really well and only go if they're feeling really well prepared/alert" but idk if those are actually the best way to make it safer, or whether they're already done.
Let me ask you this: are you opposed to professional fighting? Boxing, wrestling, wwe, etc? what about football or other sports where injury like concussion is common? That's a huge risk to health being done for money, and lots of poor folks are able to use those sports to get out of poverty. I don't think that's good, there should be nobody in poverty and the people doing sports should be doing so entirely voluntarily. Likewise my proposed bandaid to ending animal testing now is not ideal, but imo it would be just as valid as doing dangerous sports for money
And I do think a lot of people would be willing to try experimental medicine for their ailments voluntarily. It's fulfilling to be able to help contribute to humanities knowledge and help ratchet us forward, and being well compensated sweetens the deal even more
Fair enough. If you can recognize that you have a strong opinion based on ethics, and are willing to read up on how things are currently done and what the problems are (both with the current way and with the way that your ethics would like it to be) thats fine.
I'm not a sports guy (at least watching sports, I do exercise weekly) and would barely notice if those would no longer exist tomorrow. So I am certainly not one to defend their existence.
And yes, I am super critical of professional sport and how much these people hurt themselves. In German we have a saying: "Sport ist Mord", sports is murder. I think in the broad population it's also used as an excuse if you're lazy and don't want to exercise, but for me it appropriately hits on the problem of professional sport. Some are better than others, for example I have not heard of many negative consequences from swimming on a professional level. But I think the problems that people get from playing rugby on a professional level are absurd. There are measurable levels of IQ drop after a few years of working as an athlete. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would willingly do that.
One difference is that in order to get to such a level you need talent and need to be into it from a young age. Yes, some people can lift their family out of poverty with it. But not because they needed some quick money.
A better comparison to paying big money for participants of clinical trials than sports is selling your kidney. You only need one, technically, so it's safe on paper. But it's a surgery that comes with some inherent risks to your life. And there is a reason we usually have two.
And again, the injury is tangential to the performance. In clinical trials a sizable fraction of the "patients" die (cells, animals, humans. The earlier in the trial the bigger this fraction. Animal test are there to hopefully have the number be zero when we get to human trials), until we know what dose is effective and safe at the same time.
Yep, I don't think the benefit we get from animal testing justifies exploiting animals like we do. I'd rather die because we don't know how to cure me than force any animals through what we do to them in testing, and I think it's selfish to say they should suffer for our gain. And to be clear there are aspects of my life where I act hypocritically there (e.g. crop deaths) but I'm working towards getting to a spot where I don't depend on that kind of thing, and if we as a species actually put our minds to it I think we could solve those problems so it didn't take such a tremendous amount of personal effort to stop contributing to it. But we need enough people to even recognize it's a problem worth solving first.