Scott Adams's Blog, page 293

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In the Top Tech Blog...

Bionic eye lenses that are better than laser eye surgery (maybe). A digital mirror that shows you what you look like in different clothing. And a gadget that monitors your sleep and tells you how to do it better next time. 

Robots Read News - About No News

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Meanwhile, at Top Tech Blog, some youngsters figured out how to solve the world’s energy problems with salt. It sounds ridiculous because I left out the part that they are MIT students. So yeah, it probably works. (Dilbert’s cartoon degree is from MIT.)

How about some bionic leg attachments that allow you to run at 25 miles per hour? That’s faster than most commute traffic around here. Why not run to work?

And now your facial expressions can be sucked into a computer model. Organic-you is becoming obsolete. Digital you is awesome though, so there’s that.

Twitter: @scottadamssays

Just for fun, if you send me a photo of a recent graduate reading my book (that happens to be the perfect graduation gift) I’ll post it here for the world.

Book is here.

How to Be Not-Scary

An hour ago I heard my assistant opening a door that I happened to be standing near. It was one of those situations likely to scare the heck out of her. I was an adult male in an unexpected place, and too close. As a courtesy, I decided to act as not-scary as possible. I had about one second to plan my presentation.

A second wasn’t long enough. She won’t need any coffee today.

But in that one second I went through a lot of possible options for my posture, demeanor, and general expression. The way I approached the role was to go all statue-like as soon as the door opened. No sudden motions. That seemed right. But judging from the outcome, I think it came off as more of an undead vibe.

This prompted my assistant (after recovering) to tell me of a similar situation she encountered some years years ago. She was at a gun show, which makes the story extra good, and was in the situation I was in today. A stranger was about to come around a curtain and it would likely result in a surprised reaction. To avoid scaring the approaching stranger – at the gun show – she blurted “Don’t be afraid!” and raised her hand in the “halt” position just as they met.

I have never been to a gun show, but I have to think that one of the scariest things you can hear from a stranger at such an event is “Don’t be afraid.” My assistant’s method did not work out any better than mine.

This is why couples need an app that vibrates their phones or watches when they come within 15-feet of each other after being apart for over an hour. But only in their own homes. 

—

In Top Tech Blog, wearable cameras are coming. As every conspiracy theorist already knows, this is the first step before they become mandatory :-)

It won’t be long before all of our gadgets have eyes. Sort of. Someday soon, your car, phone, and camera might be doing more than collecting light and digitizing it. They might identify what, and who, they are seeing. Add that capability to the cloud and you have a form of intelligent life, in my opinion. Life isn’t much more than intelligently reacting to the environment. Eyes plus cloud intelligence gets you there.

And just in time to make it a fair fight with the robot armies to come, the first true cyborg limbs are almost here. Control them with your brain. I plan to run marathons when I’m a hundred. Seriously.

Oh, and there is now a penis robot too. Sort of. Today it is used for data analysis purposes, to figure out which arousal methods work best for a particular woman. But if guys were worried about losing their jobs at the loading docks, this can only make things worse.

Scott

@scottadamssays

Dilbert Facebook page here

The Lonely Geek Advantage

A few months ago my brother was in town and we spent much of our time tinkering with a new lighting system for my garage man-cave, tracking down some Ethernet wiring problems, learning how to edit video, connecting an old computer to an old television to display my website analytics, and a few other projects.

Geeky stuff.

How much did we enjoy it? A lot. My brother’s visit was the highlight of my month. Everything we worked on had a functional purpose, but the reason we allocated our leisure time to it is because it was fun.

As a result of tinkering on stuff with my brother, I learned a boatload of new and useful things. Some of those things will be directly useful to my job in the future and others will form patterns that will be indirectly useful. Every time you learn a new thing it creates a template for more easily understanding future new things. So I came out way ahead.

Now to my point.

In the comments to my recent(ish) post about the unacceptably low ratio of women in technology, some of you advanced your own crackpot hypotheses for why it is happening. One of the most provocative ideas is that men spend their free time learning new things in tech areas because they have some sort of baked-in interest for it. Women, so the sexist hypothesis goes, do not share the same degree of natural interest and therefore learn fewer techie things because their interest is limited to what they need for the job. 

Hold on, I need to take a brief detour for political correctness:

Note: When one says men or women as a group behave differently it says nothing about individuals within the group. I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. No need to explain it to me in the comments with an angry tone.

Does a “natural” interest in geeky things give men (on average, not as individuals) an advantage in tech fields because of all the self-learning in their leisure time? If such a gender difference exists, we can’t know what percentage of the explanation is genetic and how much is learned behavior. And I’m not even sure the question makes sense, since DNA never acts alone; it is always a partner with the environment. It makes no sense to say the engine of a car is more important than the drive train if you need both to be a functioning car.

Keep in mind that this blog is not about advocacy. I’m genuinely interested in learning what percentage of the gender imbalance in STEM fields represents something we can or should fix. Should we be aiming for 50-50 parity?

Bonus question: What the hell is a personal preference if other people can change it for you?

Suppose we learn that the reason women are underrepresented in tech jobs is that society’s negative influence on their career choices starts as soon as babies can focus their eyes and identify gender. We are a copying species. We identify the group that is most like ourselves and we follow their example. Can that cycle be broken as long as adult women are stuck in a cycle of modeling behavior that does not make geeky-learning seem womanly?

And what if we could change the preferences of young girls during childhood so they have more geeky interests later in life. Is it ethical to do so? Or is that just brainwashing?

—

In Top Tech Blog, a new camera will let a dog take photos automatically based on its level of heart excitement. I can think of no better way to gather photos for a collage of other dogs’ asses.

And someday, thanks to this new technology, future generations will be able to see history – and even human evolution – as a time-elapsed video.

In good news for alcoholics, Google is rolling out self-driving cars in some places soon.

Scott

@scottadamssays

If there is a better college graduation gift than my book, I haven’t seen it. I mean that literally. If you need corroboration for that point, here are several hundred people who would likely agree.

Death by SEO

As most of you know, several years ago I lost my ability to speak due to a rare condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia. My doctor and the specialists that he recommended were baffled. No one knew what was causing it. And until you have a name for your problem, it is nearly impossible to find a solution.

After a year of searching online for every variation of “voice problem,” and finding nothing like my symptoms, I finally – by luck or inspiration – landed on a search term that changed my life: “Voice dystonia.”

I had some history with a pinky spasm caused by overuse of my drawing hand. That condition had been quickly diagnosed years earlier as a focal dystonia (a muscle spasm issue) that is common to musicians and artists. One day, while thinking about nothing in particular, I realized that my voice problem and my hand problem could be related, even though separated by years. So I Googled “voice dystonia” and up popped a Youtube clip of someone with my exact symptoms, labelled spasmodic dysphonia.

Now I knew my enemy’s name, and that led to an eventual surgical solution. 

Imagine an estimated 50,000 people in the United States alone who have the same voice condition. As I learned during my keynote address to the folks at the NSDA (National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association), people live with this problem for YEARS because their doctors don’t know what it is. If sufferers knew the name for their problem, they could get surgery (which does not work every time) or Botox injections, which work for many.

I wonder how many people with other rare conditions are having the same problem. Search engines are designed to find the most popular content, not the most obscure. But in the case of medical issues, the obscure stuff can be life-and-death important.

The people who lose their voices to spasmodic dysphonia often lose their careers and their relationships too. And you go through life like a ghost in the room. Most of us, including me, were misdiagnosed as mental cases because of how the symptoms present. Trust me when I say you can’t imagine how bad the situation is for sufferers.

And Google could fix half of the problems for these folks in ten minutes. 

My suggestion (which might already exist?) is that Google and the other search engine companies treat rare medical conditions as exceptions to the normal ranking formulas. The most elegant fix would be a prominent line at the top of any medical search that offers to show the rare conditions first. That won’t take up much real estate on the page, and anyone with a hard-to-diagnose condition would click it for sure.

A faster fix for Spasmodic Dysphonia is to force the NSDA website  to pop up on the first page when “voice problem” is the search term. Today you have to drill down to find it, and the top results are generally out of date. (Surgery is usually not even mentioned.) My best guess, based on the general competence of the public, is that probably half of the people with spasmodic dysphonia (who tend to be over 50) can’t find it in a search when they use terms such as “voice problem.” (The search was far harder a few years ago and has improved some.)

And WebMD, I’m looking at you too. Please take a look at your “voice problem” search results. You would help a lot of folks with one prominent link to the NSDA site.

On a side note, when I spoke to the folks with Spasmodic Dysphonia at the NSDA event, I started by saying what speakers often say: “I’m happy to be here speaking to you today.” I swear no one ever meant it more than I did.

Google, Bing, Yahoo, WebMD, what do you say? Get back to me. Seriously.

Scott Adams

@scottadamssays

In other news, how about an insertable vibrator for women that collects data so she (or her partner) knows how to do things better next time? This seems like the step that happens right before men become obsolete. But for now, the device is more about collecting data. I would expect version 3.0 of the vibrator to someday remove men from the loop entirely and use the data for its own selfish purposes.

The “Systems” Business Model

A typical start-up created by an inexperienced entrepreneur has about a 10% chance of success.

But if that same entrepreneur pivots, or starts a second company, the odds of the next venture succeeding jumps to about 20%. And that makes sense because you learn a lot during your first failure, and you make a lot of contacts that can be useful later.

If you go up the odds chain, an angel investor with twenty investments in different companies might have a 70% chance of doing well because of the value of diversification.

A start-up incubator does a similar thing by holding equity in a diverse portfolio of start-ups. If only one out of ten succeeds, that can be enough to make the incubator profitable. 

You get even better odds investing in established companies that are part of an index fund, so long as you hold for a long time. Let’s say the odds of that working out for you are closer to 90%. Diversification always seems to be a good idea.

So I asked myself how a start-up could get some of the benefits of diversification while still keeping the advantages of being a start-up with a single focus. The answer, I hope, is a Systems Business Model.

I wrote the book (literally) on why systems are better than goals in most complex environments. Most start-ups are goal-focused. They might have one product (plus a few features) and too much optimism about market demand. That’s how you get to a 10% odds of success, or 20% if you are experienced at this sort of thing. A Systems Business Model attempts to improve those odds.

The start-up I co-founded (CalendarTree.com) might be the first example of a systems approach to a start-up. When we relaunch this summer you will see a portfolio of software solutions around the domain of scheduling, calendars, and time. We are able to quickly create solutions in this area because we developed a deep understanding of the market and the relevant technology while creating our original scheduling product. Once we had the knowledge and the technology platform in place we could add a dozen related but independent products to the upcoming relaunch. We’ll change our name to better fit the new offerings.

We have no idea which ones of the new products will capture people’s attention. When we relaunch we will solve about fifty common problems (I counted them) in the schedule and calendar field. (Note: We do not compete with calendars. Our job is to make your existing calendar more useful, among other things.)

If you ask me how we plan to make money, I’ll tell you I have no idea. But if any one of our products is a runaway hit, we will organize around it. If people like them as a package, we can work with that too. Maybe someday we will add some premium features. Maybe someday the app upgrade will cost one dollar. Maybe someday there will be an advertising component. We can go in any of those directions. We designed those doors to stay open.

Clearly this is not the kind of story you want to tell your potential angel investors. Those cats want to know the names of your first customers, see letters of intent, or know that you are already experiencing organic growth. No investor wants to hear “whatever” as part of your plan to monetize.

But “whatever” is exactly what makes a diversified portfolio of stocks a good investment. The whole point of “whatever” is that humans are shitty predictors of anything. But numbers are numbers. Diversification always seems to improve odds.

A Systems Business Model is designed to improve your odds of success even as you are failing on individual tasks and projects. Each failure increases our insight into what works and what does not in our chosen field. And you decide in advance that you will be taking a deep dive to find value. You won’t find many diamonds on the surface. Each failure makes us technically smarter and more insightful. And soon we will have diversification on our side. If you don’t feel a compelling need for nine of our solutions, you might get jazzed about the tenth.

This model obviously has big challenges for branding. But we figured out a way to make it work for us in this case. I’ll tell you more over the summer. 

And obviously funding is a problem with the “whatever” story. But we’ll be fine long enough to know what we have. Maybe if the Systems Business Model works for us, investors will take notice.

Is this sort of blog post interesting? I really can’t tell.

Scott 

@ScottAdamsSays

My book: How to Fail… (including why systems are better than goals).

In Top Tech 

Soon your phone will recognize you by your eyes. My next invention will be a belt buckle for men that knows when someone is looking at it and responds with, “Hey, my eyes are up here, ball-gazer.”

Vacuum-cleaning robots keep getting better. But where is my robot to pick up tennis balls after a lesson?

And now you can program your army of robots to swarm. They don’t say this is for military use, but what would be scarier than seeing a swarm of robots parachuting behind your defensive lines?

Robots Read News - About Deflategate

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In Berkeley start-up news, this guy might have found a way to turn his toe fungus into a billion-dollar business. If you have toe fungus too, and all you did about it was wear socks with your sandals, you are officially an underachiever. (This is not an investment recommendation.)

In Top Tech news, how about wings for humans, powered by jets? Already here. What could go wrong?

And do you like your robots all metallic and cold, or soft to the touch and oh-so-creepy? Technology has you covered, and the robots too.

How long before the vision-impaired have magic wands instead of canes? We’re getting there. And where the hell are the self-driving Segways so no canes are needed?

Seeing Ghosts

You have probably seen smartphone apps that purport to find ghosts in your environment. Usually there is some sort of radar-looking interface and fake science to it. It’s all silly and harmless.

But let me tell you about the ghost-finding app that someone is certain to make in the next ten years.

Imagine an app that searches obituaries online and matches those names to last-known addresses from public data. Then the app finds facial images and some sort of biography online to match each of the names and addresses. Most of us have our images on the Internet now, and that will approach 100% over time.

The biographies might be pulled from the fragments of various online social media profiles and posts. The app might find obituaries, blog mentions, or even news items. Someday the Internet will “know” all of us well enough to auto-create a bio and obituary at the time of death. 

Now imagine you have this app. You could walk down a street and “see” through your phone’s screen the digitally-created floating ghosts near the last place each of them lived. The faces would be rendered from online photos and the bodies would be generic, whispy-floaty images. The semi-transparent animated ghosts would be transposed on the real-world scenery that a user sees when pointing a camera.

To add creepiness to creepiness, assume the ghost faces morph slowly from one age of the deceased as shown in photos to another. And because some available photos might show the person facing left, some right, and some straight ahead, you could animate the ghost faces to slowly look toward you as you look at them on your smartphone’s display.

A-a-a-a-a-and … the ghosts can talk. At least some of them can. Someday most folks will have a video and audio presence on the Internet. Your voice samples could be converted to whatever level of AI is available at the time. In the early generations if you tap a ghost image you see on your screen it can answer some simple, Siri-like questions about the local environment and the ghost’s own biography. Obviously you would add some ghost humor to the app so it could respond to users asking funny questions. 

And if the app has a lot of photos from which to animate the head, it can also animate the lips by finding photos that show teeth and those that do not. That is enough to animate the lips during speech as long as the image is rendered as a semi-transparent, liquid-like, ever-morphing face. With that model the lips don’t need to be closely matched to the words. You want more of a zombie-mouth look to fit the vibe anyway.

Version 1.0 of this app could be limited to dead celebrity ghosts because the images, voice clips, and bios would be readily available. Version 2.0 could include anyone who had an extensive Internet presence. Eventually we will all be characters in the app’s alternate universe. (Unless we already are, obviously.)

This app will make for a great walking tour.

In Top Tech Blog:

Scientists have built a cloaking device. But it only works on small objects. Even Daniel Radcliffe is too tall for it, in case you wondered. Industrial designers will probably show interest if only to make the buttons on all of my devices even harder to find.

And how about a case for your phone that harvests meaningful energy from your phone’s radio signals? Do you believe that works? I don’t. But only because it sounds like the sort of thing that never works. I hope it does.

And NASA successfully tested an electromagnetic propulsion unit in a vacuum. Ironically, it did not suck. (Vacuum humor!)

—-

Blah, blah, blah best graduation gift of all time, not counting money.

Death with Dignity - Claims Phase

In my prior post, Jimmy Akins provided the seed argument against physician-assisted death that I will pass through what I call the Rationality Engine. 

I have reduced Jimmy’s extensive arguments, along with other notable thoughts on the topic, into “claims” which I will soon evaluate for a verdict. 

Today I hope you can check my work and make sure the claims are clear, bias-free, and complete before I start with verdicts.

A lot of my readers here are big-media writers and editors, along with politicians and other thought leaders. So what we do here does influence the real world. And I think it is important because literally nowhere else is anyone even attempting objectivity on this topic.

Before we get to the draft of claims, let’s look at the bias in the participants. When you spot more bias as the debate progresses, please call it out.

Bias spotlight:

Rationality Engine Host (me): I have personal experience with six relatives who suffered in the final months of their lives. I do not want to go that way. And I do not want you to go that way either, unless it is your preference.

I am a non-believer in souls and deities. But in recent years I have become pro-religion because I see it as a benefit to people’s lives. We are all different, and religion fills a need in some folks. I’m a fan of anything that works.

Debate Participant (Jimmy Akins): Jimmy is affiliated with the Catholic Church but does not work for it. His personal experience with the topic includes his wife passing from cancer while declining offers of potentially life-saving treatments. And he witnessed pressure on his wife to forego those potentially useful treatments and let death happen.

The point of the Rationality Engine is to use public scrutiny to scrub out the bias in the debate over time. Some bias has already been identified (by readers and by Jimmy) and I attempted to remove it in this draft. When you see more bias, call it out in the comments. This is a living debate.

I remind you that the verdicts here are always preliminary. If the data changes, or better thinking is presented, the intent is to improve the argument as we go.

The truth filter used for the Rationality Engine attempts to find at least two pieces of support for every claim. Reliable data and replicated science will always be the top filters for truth, along with logic and reason. But if any of that conflicts with our personal observation, or the observations of others, that too has to be factored into a verdict.

Claims - First Draft

Claim: Well-meaning doctors, family, and friends will have a natural desire to end the suffering of a patient because we feel empathy and we imagine we would want death in that situation. This primes all people involved to be coercive even if only in a subtle and unconscious way.

Claim: The AMA, the Catholic Church, and disabled rights groups oppose physician-assisted death. Even if you disagree with their position, collectively they form a useful counter-force against society slipping into a death culture.

Claim X and Y: The common good is not served by allowing people a legal option to harm themselves, for two reasons among others:

Claim X: We have lots of laws that limit personal choice for the common good. For example, you can’t drive at night on the freeway with your headlights off because your choice could kill someone, including yourself, and we are all components of the common good.Claim Y: Our sense of the value of human life (and dignity) is influenced by the actions of individuals and by laws. Legalizing physician-assisted death, along with widespread use, would decrease the value we assign to life by treating it the way we treat food that is past its expiration date.

Claim: The so-called Slippery Slope argument is real, and intentionally engineered in some issues. Proponents for gun control, medical marijuana, pro-life, and bans on smoking all took small steps (because that’s all they could get) with a strategy of getting people used to the new situation before going for more. 

Claim: Proponents of physician-assisted death in California are limiting their focus to terminal patients in pain who have a sane preference for death. 

But if that right is established by law, it will make it easier for proponents of even greater euthanasia rights to push for more. This would be a threat to the disabled and the elderly. 

Claim: A Dutch study of their physician-assisted suicide laws showed that in 28% of cases the strict criteria were not fulfilled. This suggests a high potential for abuse of the law beyond its intended boundaries. 

Note: Jimmy Akins does not rely on the slippery slope argument but in response to my question he does call it out as a legitimate concern. Jimmy’s objections are to the proposed law on its own merits, not simply a concern that things could worsen.

Claim: The Common Good can include a situation that is bad for one member of the group and good for another. The relative weight of the individual concerns matters. For example, an inconvenience to one person would be ranked lower than physical harm to another.

Claim: There is no objective standard for the Common Good, so once we leave the realm of the obvious (death versus inconvenience), humans can be expected to disagree, especially when self-interest is involved.

Claim: When reasonable people disagree about what constitutes the Common Good, there is no objective standard to break the tie. 

Claim: A mind that is “trapped” in a non-functional body is just one of many forms of pain and need not be treated differently for the discussion of physician-assisted death. Pain is pain.

Claim: A brain without consciousness, that is still functioning to keep the body alive, has human dignity. 

Claim: A brain that has no consciousness and is not capable of keeping the body alive without medical intervention no longer possess the dignity of a living person. (But it would maintain the dignity we accord to corpses.)

Claim: It is rare for a person to experience pain in the final months of death. Most deaths are either sudden, involve pain for a short period, or involve manageable levels of pain using medications. And as stated, improvements in pain management, including induced coma options, could reduce the issue of pain management to a trivial number of cases.

Claim: It would not make sense to pass a law that benefits only the rare exceptions (as horrible as they are) when you consider the wider impact on human dignity and other practical matters (discussed further down).

Claim: Old people are not good advocates for their own pain relief. 

Claim: When mentally weak patients are not good advocates for their own pain relief, the most reasonable solution is to give them better advocates, not make it legal for them to take their own lives.

Claim: From a Catholic perspective, pain and suffering before death do not decrease human dignity. 

Claim: From a Catholic perspective, ending your own life decreases human dignity. 

(Note: Jimmy’s views on life are obviously informed by his faith, but in this case he is putting forth an argument based on reason as he sees it. (He also agrees with the AMA and they are not a religion.) That said, no differences of opinion between Jimmy and the Church have been noted.)

Claim: The only arguments against physician-assisted death are based on religion. (The implication is that atheists would call it magical thinking.)

Claim: As a society we should not settle for doctor-assisted death because we can do better.

Claim: Legal options for assisted death would decrease the efforts put into finding cures. Why find cures when you can just get rid of patients?

Claim: Pain can be completely removed by drug-induced coma. Therefore, no one needs to suffer before death.

Claim: In California it is illegal to aid or encourage another to commit suicide, therefore the legislature of California appears to believe it promotes the common good.

Claim: It is not accurate to say a citizen of California is being “denied the right” to physician-assisted death because rights are created by laws and that right has not been created.

Claim: There is no “moral right” that supports the idea of allowing physician-assisted death. 

Claim: The “common good” standard is the most reasonable standard for deciding on the legality of physician assisted death.

Claim: The “common good” includes both the good of individuals and the good of individuals in a group. Both are important.

Claim: Physician-assisted death violates “innate, intrinsic, human dignity.”

Claim: For the purpose of discussing physician-assisted death, it does not matter if human dignity is the product of a “soul” or an emergent property of a complex system.

Claim: Human dignity (whether soul-based or an emergent property of a complex system) is real, and has consequences for how people must be treated.

Claim: Because humans have innate “dignity,” their lives “mean something” and they “must be respected” to a higher degree than we respect inanimate objects, for example.

Claim: No one has less right to life based on how near or far they are to death.

Claim: Dignity applies to ourselves as well as others, and it is possible to disrespect yourself.

Claim: We “deserve” love and respect because each of us has human dignity worthy of that love and respect.

Claim: Because of the near-universal belief in human dignity (or a similar concept) throughout history, and across societies, there has always been a stigma on suicide as something that is bad and wrong.

Claim: Physician-assisted death is never a desirable outcome in a world in which human dignity matters and pain can be totally eliminated by medications (which might include an induced coma.)

Claim: Putting a terminal patient into a pain-free coma until death preserves human dignity.

Claim: There are practical barriers to full pain-elimination in the real world, for a variety of reasons, but our efforts are better served by fixing that situation as opposed to promoting physician-assisted death with its human dignity issues.

Claim: Helping a patient find pain relief better corresponds to the requirements of human dignity than letting them die, even if they prefer death.

Claim: A medical professional would debase herself by being part of a system that assists in the killing of innocent people. This too is a violation of human dignity for the professionals involved.

Claim: Violating the dignity of another is a violation of one’s own dignity. In other words, if I kill you, my dignity suffers as well.

Claim: Asking a professional to violate your dignity (in any way) does not make the violation acceptable because human dignity is bigger than personal preferences.

Claim: The American Medical Association opposes physician-assisted death, explaining that it would cause “more harm than good” for three given reasons:

 It is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer.Difficult or impossible to controlWould pose serious societal risks

Claim: Legalizing physician-assisted death would put pressure on patients to kill themselves.

Claim: Patients are more likely to be abandoned once it is thought a cure is impossible.

Claim: People might someday be denied insurance payments for medical treatments when physician-assisted death is an option.

Claim: Medical progress will slow because there is no point trying to solve a problem already “solved” by assisted death.

Claim: Human dignity is better served by giving grandma enough pain medication to eliminate suffering, not allowing her to suffer and giving her only the option of death.

Claim: There are reported problems with Oregon’s laws on physician-assisted death

Claim: It is impossible to know how many problems Oregon has had with their physician-assisted death laws because it is unlikely all problems are reported.

Claim: If a family member coerced grandma to seek assisted death for personal gain, no one would know of this crime. Grandma would soon be dead and the perpetrator would not talk.

Claim: It is irrelevant to the discussion whether Oregonians are happy with their law because they are not likely to be well-informed about how it is working for individuals. That sort of data is not tracked, and it would be impossible to obtain data on whether family members were being coercive.

Claim: A poll of Oregonians regarding their experience with physician-assisted death would be unreliable because the way you ask the question will influence the result.

Claim: In the context of this discussion, psychological anguish is considered pain, not just physical pain.

Claim: An advanced medical directive (in which you state your end-of-life preferences while still healthy) would eliminate some but not all concerns about a patient being coerced into choosing death.

Claim: Some folks will not set up an advanced medical directive, so that is a problem.

Claim: A person can be coerced to change their advanced medical directive while still mentally capable but susceptible to manipulation.

Claim: There is no objective standard for deciding if someone is mentally incompetent, so some people will be making advanced medical directives under coercion.

Claim: Including a physician-assisted death instruction in an advanced healthcare directive would devalue human life by reducing it to a check box on a form.

Claim: Complete pain relief is medically possible, as demonstrated by anesthesia during surgery.

Claim: The assisted death pills used in Oregon have not worked every time, especially when they cause vomiting. No data is available on how often complications arise.

Claim: Complete pain relief in the form of induced comas is not common practice today, probably for a variety of reasons.

Claim: A rational person can decide to live in pain until the end of life for a variety of reasons.

Claim: Physicians are reluctant to induce comas in today’s world.

Claim: Insurance might not cover induced comas for pain relief. (Speculation.)

Claim: According to the American Medical Association, physicians are reluctant to be aggressive in pain medication and they believe education can help.

Claim: Patients suffer less when they have a sense of control over their own suffering. So one path for improvement is allowing more patients to regulate their own pain meds as is sometimes the case now.

Claim: We have no data to tell us how many people might want a physician-assisted death. The number could be in the hundreds-of-millions someday as science continues to improve at keeping people alive long after their bodies have become useless.

Claim: It is possible that someday our skills at pain relief (without coma) and mood regulation will be so good that dying will rarely be preferred. In that case, a law allowing physician-assisted dying would create far more risk than benefit.

Claim: In some cases a person might choose death right before an incurable condition finds a cure. That situation is rare now, but could change as the rate of cures advances.

Claim: We have no data on how many folks would be encouraged to take their lives if physician-assisted death were legal in more places, but it would probably be “lots of people” because even in today’s world we see dying people pressured to forego potentially life-extending procedures toward the end of life.

Sources: (Incomplete)

For the proposed text of the California law, see here.

For a critique of the California law, see here:

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Top Tech Blog:Battery-operated homes
quantum computing breakthroughs.
Transparent armor
Tiny robots that are super-strong

Berkeley Start-Ups Spotlight:

Honeit might someday make the idea of a job interview seem antiquated.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays

That Time I Tried to Watch a Video on the Internet

About ten times a day I see a link on the Internet to a video clip that looks interesting or newsworthy. I usually click that link because apparently I am incapable of learning from experience.

As you know, videos on the Internet sometimes crash your device. Sometimes they start but never play to completion because of traffic loads. 

Sometimes there is no video to be found at the end of the links. 

Sometimes intrusive ads disguised as videos create too many decoys and I give up searching for the real one on the page.

And sometimes the video clips start with ads that are longer than my attention span. I bail out after 5 seconds of nothingness to get on with my life.

People say videos on the Internet are awesome. I hope to someday see one. Have any of you ever seen one? Do the images move the entire time, like television?

If this image is blocked by your company firewall, see it on Twitter here, then change jobs.

Scott

@scottadamssays 

On Top Tech Blog:

Soon your eyeglasses will be able to read your emotions. That’s more than I can do already. I hope those glasses never learn to pretend they are interested in what you are saying because that’s my only remaining advantage.

And how about a smartphone attachment that can see your DNA? That could come in handy because I like my women with a little extra neanderthal in them and I don’t want to be disappointed later.

A new camera can record frames so fast that someday my video security system will be able to see the Human Flash rummage through my refrigerator when I am asleep. I know he’s down there, but so far he has gotten away with it. No more!

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What has two thumbs and wrote a book that is an ideal gift for graduates? This guy.