My Left Kidney
I&#x27;ve always enjoyed this author&#x27;s work, but there&#x27;s something almost pathological about the way he assumes that the risks of this act are well-quantified enough to make a rational mathematical decision about it, or that those risks are even well-quantifiable at all; there are ten thousand paths to medical complication here that aren&#x27;t captured in &quot;this is the percentage of healthy kidney donors who died during the operation or died of kidney disease later&quot;.<p>Honestly, I would have respected &quot;I wanted to do it, I became obsessed with doing it, I knew it was likely dangerous and I can&#x27;t quantify how dangerous, but it did it anyway because I thought it was important&quot; more than this many-page attempt to mathematize the un-mathematizable.<p>Which I guess raises a larger point about how the rationalist and EA and other similar communities have a tendency to try to reduce fiendishly complex multivariable human issues to equations and statistics without realizing that some problems are not math problems and will defy any attempt to be quantified, statistitized, or calculated.