Comment by sarchertech

Comment by sarchertech 3 days ago

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So he was very old without any significant problems, but he wanted to avoid the inevitable problems?

If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren. He even made the 9 hour trip to come see us last year.

I’m very wary of making it legal for doctors to euthanize an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid an eventual decline.

It’s relatively common for families to push people into nursing homes, but in this case there’s an even stronger direct financial incentive. I don’t trust the system to adequately prevent this.

1dom 3 days ago

> If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren.

Counter-anecdote, my partners Granddad is 93. Age 90, we said the same as you. Now he's an old, rude, obnoxious liability - he's still great, and I don't hold it against him, he's earned the right. But I've never known anyone naturally age and die without losing their ability to be civil in some way towards the end.

From the article:

> Kahneman knew that many would see his decision as premature. But that was exactly what he intended, he wrote: If you wait until a life is "obviously no longer worth living", it is already too late.

I personally wish my partners final memories of her Granddad were him at 90, and not at 93. I've known for a good 5 - 10 years I will take the same route as Kahneman. I feel the desire to stay alive long enough to be a liability for yourself and those around you is a decision motivated by ego and fear, rather than compassion or logic.

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  • sarchertech 3 days ago

    >I feel the desire to stay alive long enough to be a liability for yourself and those around you is a decision motivated by ego and fear, rather than compassion or logic.

    Everyone becomes a liability at some point. By that logic we should just go full Logan’s run and kill people as soon as they stop being productive.

    There nothing wrong with saying that you aren’t going to take extreme measures to preserve your life past a certain age.

    But I don’t want this attitude of “you should kill yourself so you don’t burden your family” to become the norm either.

    What if your partner’s grandad heard you calling him a rude obnoxious liability and felt pressured into killing himself?

    >I've never known anyone naturally age and die without losing their ability to be civil in some way towards the end.

    But many people die suddenly with no serious mental decline at all. That can happen at 95 or 100 the same as it happens earlier.

    If you rule out everyone who didn’t die of some nebulous cause as the result of a slow decline you are selecting for people who mentally decline.

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    • 1dom 3 days ago

      > Everyone becomes a liability at some point. By that logic we should just go full Logan’s run and kill people as soon as they stop being productive.

      That's ridiculous. People can be unproductive, but not a liability.

      > But I don’t want this attitude of “you should kill yourself so you don’t burden your family” to become the norm either.

      I can see that, but you haven't explained why. Personally, I don't want to burden myself, my family and those I care about, that's important to me. There must be something more important to you that justifies burdening loved ones with a hard painful death of a loved one. Help me understand: what's that thing for you, if not ego/fear?

      > What if your partner’s grandad heard you calling him a rude obnoxious liability and felt pressured into killing himself?

      The alternative is he's unnaturally kept alive in a perpetual state of suffering for him and the people around him. If he hadn't suffered mental decline, I know he'd never consciously choose that, another reason why I'd like to make sure I'm gone before serious decline kicks in.

      > But many people die suddenly with no serious mental decline at all. That can happen at 95 or 100 the same as it happens earlier.

      That doesn't change anything. I agree with Kahnemans point that becoming a burden is too late. If I accept that, without being able to predict the future, it then becomes a game of risk. Kahnamen decided the risk of him becoming a burden was greater than the risk of him continuing to live what he would consider a productive (edit: "valuable" is probably a better word here) life.

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      • sarchertech 3 days ago

        >That's ridiculous. People can be unproductive, but not a liability.

        That would depend on your definition of liability I suppose. Many people would consider a parent who was no longer capable of productive output (work, helping out around the house, watching the kids) a liability. I suppose you may be using the term to mean "you'd rather not have them around anymore because their company is no longer offsetting the cost to you".

        >There must be something more important to you that justifies burdening loved ones with a hard painful death of a loved one. Help me understand: what's that thing for you, if not ego/fear?

        This isn't about me. As of right now I don't plan on taking any heroic measures to preserve my life past a certain point. The issue is I don't care why someone wants to stick around. I want them to feel free to do continue to do so.

        >The alternative is he's unnaturally kept alive in a perpetual state of suffering for him and the people around him.

        Depends on what you mean by being unnaturally kept alive. He could have opted out of medical treatment at any time. Once his capacity to make his own decisions was gone, his family could opt out of that treatment for him.

        >That doesn't change anything. I agree with Kahnemans point that becoming a burden is too late. If I accept that, without being able to predict the future, it then becomes a game of risk. Kahnamen decided the risk of him becoming a burden was greater than the risk of him continuing to live what he would consider a productive (edit: "valuable" is probably a better word here) life.

        Personally I think trying to predict the future and what the people around me would or wouldn't want is futile. And choosing when to die to prevent this is impossible. Some people will go downhill at 55, some at 110. If you really consider the burden of a few years of decline to be so awful on your family that you place a very high value on avoiding it, you'd need probably need to kill yourself much earlier than 90, probably 75 to really reduce the chance to a small enough level that you don't really need to worry about it very much.

        The problems I see are that several.

        1. People will feel pressured into suicide because they feel they are might be a burden to their family that their family doesn't want. Even if they aren't. You can't know what your family actually thinks. If they say "no dad I don't want you to kill yourself", are they being honest or not?

        2. People will feel pressured into suicide because their family has made it clear that they are a burden on them. These people might want to keep living for whatever reason. Fear/ego whatever. I don't care why they want to. I don't want them to feel obligated to commit suicide.

        3. The financial incentives for families to pressure otherwise healthy people into suicide.

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    • [removed] 3 days ago
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    • EasyMark 3 days ago

      the big question is why do you get to choose that for me or why is it society's choice and not my own? assuming I'm of a healthy mental state.

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      • sarchertech 2 days ago

        If you want to kill yourself the way many old people have done forever (by no longer eating), in most cases society doesn’t have a say.

        If you want to involve society by petitioning the courts to have a doctor kill you, society gets a say because you’ve involved society.

        There’s no country with assisted suicide laws where society doesn’t get a say because killing someone by default is murder, and exceptions must be highly regulated.

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      • account42 a day ago

        Because we can't make it so that your choice isn't influenced by society.

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hyperman1 3 days ago

I see a lot of elder people age very suddenly. It's like the capacity to recuperate from a problem is gone. With some luck no such problems appear and you can become old without much troubles. But once a problem appears, it hits in full force.

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ta1243 3 days ago

My nan made it to 92 without any mental issues, but then deteriorated significantly over the course of 18 months, forgetting she'd ever been married, had kids, etc, just reverted to believing she was a teenager who wanted to go home to her parents (in a house which was destroyed in ww2)

She couldn't look after herself was was forced into care by the courts. Since going into a home she's physically never been fitter, but mentally she's not the person she was 10 years ago -- it's not that she's changed personality, it's as if her memory of the last 80 years was wiped.

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  • sarchertech 3 days ago

    That’s terrible, but you never know when or if the decline is going to happen, so if you pick an arbitrary cutoff you’ll have killed people who had plenty of good years left.

    Many people die suddenly with no decline at all.

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    • ta1243 2 days ago

      It's an interesting thing. Aside from the constant complaints she's being held prisoner she's far happier now than she was 10 years ago, but the person she was no longer exists. How does that factor in to how wishes can be expressed. What is important - the mind or the body?

      Your assertion

      > If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100

      Doesn't really hold up, either in my anecdote (life) or in data

      In the UK 70% of men aged 90 today will die before being 95. Most will die before turning 94. Women have about 40% chance of making it to 95.

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cdman 3 days ago

No, he was an old man who cared for his wife with dementia until his death, an experience which changed him. And thus he has chosen to go on his own accord.

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Tepix 3 days ago

As long as people are thinking clearly, i think it should be up to them.

There is no financial incentive. No-one is making any money from assisted suicide in Switzerland.

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  • account42 a day ago

    > No-one is making any money from assisted suicide in Switzerland.

    This is obviously an outright falsehood. Nonprofit doesn't mean that no one gets paid.

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nabla9 3 days ago

If the society treats people badly, that's not a reason to deny them the ability to do final exit with dignity. We must fight to fix the problem cases, not take dignity away from those who suffer from it.

> It’s relatively common for families to push people into nursing homes,

So you are rejected by your family and punished even more by taking away a dignified exit strategy?

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  • sarchertech 3 days ago

    Nothing is being taken away. Medically assisted suicide to prevent old age has never been a right anyone has had under any legal framework until very recently. And it’s not a right anyone has anywhere but a few countries.

    You can argue that more countries should grant that right. But if you’re going to do so, you need to have an answer for the incentives it creates.

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  • account42 a day ago

    You got this the wrong way around: we should deal with the root cause instead of finding ways to make offing people acceptable.

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lblume 3 days ago

I agree with your legal assessment and still think of the case as very interesting. The article explicitly talks about how any such decision could have only been premature, for the slow cognitive decline is typically only noticed when it is too late, and because the change is continuous, there can be no good commitment to "I no longer consider this life worthwhile once condition X is no longer satisfied".

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