Scott Alexander’s article on altruistic kidney donation weighed the initial CT scan as a heavy negative, like an incremental 1 in 650 risk of death. Shocking to me at the time, but the number seemed to check out, at least as a first order estimate.
Yuck, I have recurrent kidney stones and have had many CT-scans. It seems to have become the standard procedure when you complain of abdominal pain at the ER. Years ago I remember just getting an X-ray.
What's interesting is I needed surgery to remove the most recent stones, and I've not had a CT-scan since- the urologist uses ultrasound.
On the other hand, I've had fluoroscopy.. probably worse than even CT-scans.
The comments on that article heavily criticized that portion. I don't know jack about the topic, but it really did seem like just Scott's envelope-math against the sentiment of the entire field: "this is not enough radiation to matter".
This is absolutely par for the course for university endowments. They're not big pots of money, they're thousands of small pots of money with various restrictions on their investment, disbursement, etc.
For a quick institution specific overview, see “with donor restrictions” on page 20-21 (pdf page 21-22) of their most recent annual report[0].
I’d imagine “maintain and invest the original contribution in perpetuity” covers majority of the restricted funds, with use-specific restrictions in a distant but comfortable second. Since it’s Harvard, they probably also have more funky restrictions than the average bear (gifts of stock in kind with restrictions on timing of sale, voting, etc.).
Even if you hold those views (with which we'd all, I hope, vigorously disagree), America is _still_ your jam, up to and until they mutate into crimes / criminal attempts / incitements to crime etc. The ways this administration has persued removal either violate that boundary, or require stretching the boundary around the right-hand side to its absolute limit.
Nevermind the improbability that a decrease in living standards would actually compress the distribution of living standards - Are you seriously arguing that's desirable? That it's better to reduce everyone's lots so that we can be more equal?
If you asked me a couple years ago, I would absolutely oppose it, but now I am seriously entertaining the idea that it may be better to live in a poorer but more equal society.
It seems that the majority cares far more about comparative wealth than absolute wellbeing, and is willing to destroy the system if they don't get what they want.
I'd actually agree that, at any level of living standard, the more equal society is probably happier. I'd question whether that'd be an effective _intervention_ though. Actively reducing the median standard of a relatively well-to-do society to compress the overall distribution does not seem like it would lead to a net increase in happiness.
