Discrimination on the basis of disability

autisticadvocacy.org ASAN Statement On The Killing Of Nancy Fitzmaurice 28 October 2014

Unfortunately, ASAN’s position reflects an ignorance of medical reality. While doctors cannot deny a person from being offered food and water, this should not be conflated with artificial nutrition and hydration. Medical interventions such as intravenous fluids cause harm though pain and risk of complications. This harm is justified when it is outweighed by benefit such as improved long-term wellbeing.

All medical interventions require informed consent. After consent is given, it can still be withdrawn. In situations where the patient cannot give consent, the next of kin becomes the surrogate decision maker, whose wishes must be respected as long as they are in the patient’s best interests. With Nancy Fitzmaurice’s mother, this was the case.

For people who are severely disabled, the risks of intervention increase due to comorbidity, reduced physiological reserve, and reduced ability to recognise and communicate problems at an early stage. Conversely, the potential for benefit decreases in the setting of incurable illness. Thus, the ethical calculus of intervention shifts towards net harm. In a reality where all must die, there is an ethical imperative to offer “quality of death” with dignified peace rather than protracted torture.

While sounding negative to the medically untrained, "discrimination on the basis of disability" is a doctor's duty and failure to discriminate is negligence.

(original article from JYW's wall)

http://singularity24601.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/quality-of-life-quality-of-death.html

By any other name

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

– William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597)

Image credit: Michael Kobayashi CC BY-SA 3.0

As expected of complex situations, the homosexual marriage debate contains a number of interesting semantic issues:

Re: “Marriage is between a man and a woman by definition”

Language evolves continuously. Claiming that “mail is written on paper and sent through the postal system by definition” does not constitute an argument against legalised electronic mail.  Calling Adenium obesum “desert rose,” even though it is not a “true rose” of genus Rosa, does not negatively affect other roses.

Re: “I support traditional marriage”

This is a euphemism for “I am against homosexual marriage” and propagates the myth that legalised homosexual marriage somehow negatively affects heterosexual marriage. I support traditional marriage and wish that one day I might have a traditional marriage of my own. In addition (rather than “in subtraction”), I support homosexual marriage for those who wish it.

Re: “Allow civil unions, but don’t call it marriage”

People with such sentiments should therefore be satisfied by “homosexual marriiage” instead of “homosexual marriage.” However, practical problems arise, such as being forced to reveal one’s orientation due to ticking “marriied” instead of “married” when filling a form. The absurdity of the literal “one iota of difference” aside, the importance of nominative (versus denotative) equality should not be overlooked. Suppose all people are called “humans,” except for Chinese people who are called “chings.” “Humans” have “human rights” and “chings” have “ching rights” such that the two are equal. Despite denotative equality, it is understandable for Chinese people to find this arrangement offensive.

Re: “My activism against homosexual marriage does not mean I am a bigot or that I hate homosexual people. In fact, I have homosexual friends.”

If I say that “medical practice should be illegal, not that I hate medical practitioners, for I have medical practitioner friends” in absence of any logically defensible reason, it is understandable for medical practitioners to nevertheless feel hated, regardless of whether I actually have such hatred. What is given may not be what is received. If one continually sends roses with good intentions, yet the recipient is allergic to roses, the onus to resolve this unfortunate situation falls upon the sender.

Fundamental physics pseudo-paradoxes

Phys.org Physicist proposes solution to arrow-of-time paradox 27 August 2009

Loschmidt’s paradox, that time-symmetric dynamics should not lead to irreversible processes, is an illusion that originates from quirks of human definition.

Firstly, “observable” versus “absolute” reversibility should not be conflated. A whirlwind in a library is far more likely to randomly scatter the 60 volumes of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography out of alphabetical order than it is to randomly scatter them back into alphabetical order. While the latter scenario is expected to essentially never happen (the number of ways of arranging 60 books, approximately 10⁸², may exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe), the probability is still greater than zero. Therefore “observably” irreversible processes may still be “absolutely” reversible. (Poincaré recurrence theorem is a related concept, whose popularity in cosmology, however, is unjustified due to reliance upon non-physical premises.)

Secondly, physical processes may appear asymmetrical only because of asymmetrical categorisation. Of the 10⁸² ways of arranging 60 volumes, 1 has been categorised as “alphabetical order” (volumes 1, 2, 3…) while 10⁸² – 1 have been categorised as “jumble;” as described in Boltzmann’s entropy formula, macrostates with greater entropy contain more microstates, S = k_B ln W. However, each “jumble” microstate, a particular configuration of “jumble” (eg, volumes 24, 60, 1…), is actually of equal likelihood as “alphabetical order.”

As a rough demonstration, the situation between “wine glass” and “mess” appears asymmetrical at first glance:

However, when one considers that “mess” comprises more microstates than “wine glass” (ie, of all the ways of arranging glass molecules, more result in a “mess” than in a “wine glass”), the asymmetry disappears (in reality, the difference in number of microstates is greater by many orders of magnitude):

The arrow of time, that entropy only increases over time despite time-symmetric dynamics, is closely related but nevertheless a separate paradox. This phenomenon is an illusion resulting from low-entropy initial conditions. (Just as Newton’s laws describe the motion of a falling apple but not the initial height of the apple, so cosmological initial conditions may be separate from other laws of physics.)

The action of S = k ln W over time can be analogised in how a carbon dioxide molecule originating in an opened can of soft drink will diffuse into the air of the room, then the airspace of the street, then suburb, then city, then state, et cetera (the position of the molecule analogises, in phase space, the current microstate of a system and the volume of each body of air analogises W for each macrostate). While the actual law is that atmospheric carbon dioxide diffuses randomly throughout the atmosphere, the apparent law that carbon dioxide only diffuses from smaller to larger bodies of air only arises from the remarkable statistical unlikelihood of the particular molecule initially chosen (inside a can of soft drink, out of all the carbon dioxide on Earth).

While superficially appearing to be time-asymmetric phenomena emerging from time-symmetric dynamics, neither Loschmidt’s paradox nor the arrow of time are paradoxical. The former arises from the fact that random rearrangements of glass molecules are far more likely to correspond to “mess” than to “wine glass” and the latter from the remarkableness of random glass molecules being in the form of a wine glass in the first place. The true conundrum then is not of thermodynamics but of initial conditions. 

Unde venistis?

Wei’s Neologisms #7

Contragnorance

From Latin contra (“against”) + gnārus (“knowing”)

n. (ˈkɒntrəˌɡnəɹəns)

1. A state of not merely lacking information, but rather believing in information that is false, out of context, or otherwise misleading. Easily confused with "knowledge." Worse than "ignorance."

The Golden Rule of Knowledge

"Prīmum cognōsce tuam ignōrantiam."

"First know of your ignorance." 

	“…nihil se scire dicat nisi id ipsum, eoque praestare ceteris quod illi quae nesciant scire se putent, ipse se nihil scire, id unum sciat, ob eamque rem se arbitrari ab Apolline omnium sapientissimum esse dictum quod haec esset una omnis sapientia, non arbitrari se scire quod nesciat.” “…to assert that he knows nothing except the fact of his own ignorance, and that he surpassed all other people in that they think they know things that they do not know but he himself thinks he knows nothing, and that he believed this to have been the reason why Apollo declared him to be the wisest of all men, because all wisdom consists solely in not thinking that you know what you do not know.”  – Cicero, Academic a, I, 4 (45 BCE)
	"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." – Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others (1931-35)
	"A man's got to know his limitations." – "Dirty Harry" Callahan, Magnum Force (1973)
	"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." – Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121.

Non-rivalry

Engadget Pirate Bay co-founder builds a perpetual piracy machine 21 December 2015 Peter Sunde wants to show the madness of putting a price on digital copies.

Legislation of non-rivalrous goods cannot be analogous to that of rivalrous goods. Support intellectual property reform.

http://singularity24601.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/noxiae-poena-par-esto.html

Wei’s Neologisms #6

Hangunder

n. (ˈhæŋɐn.də(ɹ))

1. When Wei has so little alcohol tolerance that he develops hangover symptoms before he's had enough to get drunk.