View 350 February 21 - 27, 2005 (original) (raw)
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Yesterday's ramble -- it's not structured enough to be called an essay or even a disquisition -- on Terry Schiavo seems to have generated passions, but part of it was misunderstood, probably because I was not as clear as usual.
First, one of the oldest maxims in legal theory is that no man may judge in his own cause. Schiavo has a financial stake in the outcome. That appears to be the only stake he has now, since he is married to Terry only in the legal sense. Why is he given the life and death decision power? He may be a saint, he may not be, he may be her murderer and he may be a hero, but he has a stake in the outcome. It is not a decision most of us would want.
Still, he is legal next of kin, and the law usually makes, even requires, that decisions regarding treatment of comatose persons be made by next of kin, many of whom do have financial stakes in the outcomes, so that argument does not hold unless we want to reconsider all of family law; in my judgment a task well beyond my competence, and one we need not undertake.
Second, and perhaps the deciding factor: leaving out all ethical and moral considerations, if we purport to make decisions of life and death on the grounds of following the comatose person's wishes, is it not important that we have unambiguous evidence of those wishes? If there were a signed document on file stating Terry's wishes regarding treatment in this circumstance, there would be no conversation. Those with moral scruples might want to talk people out of leaving such documents, but that does not concern us (and no, I am not arguing that we should talk people out of such; I merely wish to settle the supposed moral issues as irrelevant to this discussion). If the wishes of the person affected are unambiguously clear, that is the end of the matter.
However, in this case we are back to Point One: the only evidence we have of the victim's wishes come from the husband, an interested party; and the parents, not entirely rational; and her religion, which is ambiguous since the doctrine of the Church on heroic measures is not entirely clear to me: it forbids suicide but not risky actions, and the usual summary for others is "thou canst not kill but needst not strive, officiously to keep alive."
Now why is it important to determine the wishes of the affected person? Because if we do not insist on that, then we are all at the mercy of those who find us inconvenient. "Ol' Gramma didn't want to live if she got Alzheimers. Told us so a dozen times. Then she got it and it come on fast and now she isn't competent to decide. She wants to die but can't tell us." And the physicians, prompted by the Hospital Administrator and HMO Board of Directors, begin preparing the needles. (One presumes that by then we will not longer starve the old gal to death.) Now that may be the Enlightened way to treat people, but it is clearly a slippery slope: from comatose to barely conscious to responds to stimuli but is a living vegetable to non compos mentis to clearly unable to make rational decisions on this matter is a continuum with few sharp dividing lines. At least let us insist on unambiguous evidence of Gramma's wishes before starting our work.
Enlightenment rationalists do not see any problems here. She's no use to herself or the world, so turn her off for her (and our) good. From there to harvesting organs as waste prevention isn't anywhere near as long a path as you might think. Niven's Jigsaw Man was prediction as well as warning. And why not? Particularly if we are dealing with disease free healthy organs, of which there is always a shortage. Isn't it the rational position? Waste not, want not. Take the case of a 28 year old comatose traffic victim, good health, rare blood type, prime of life, organ donor card signed but no Living Will giving someone else the decision to pull the plug. In 90% of such cases she will never wake up, and the organs will deteriorate to uselessness. In the 10% of cases where she does wake up, most of the time she will not really recover and be a burden to her relatives and the society. What is the reasonable thing to do here? And who should decide?
In Terry Schiavo's case, different observers see different things. Few put her chances of recovery above "miraculous" level ( < 1% is a miracle, no?). Her parents see it differently. And anyone watching the tapes sees that she avoids pain. Earthworms do that, of course.
If she could swallow -- and some physical therapists think she can be taught to do so -- so had to be spoon fed, would we be content to watch her die of starvation? Her husband won't authorize the physical therapy that might or might not work (or might or might not have worked years and years ago). Is this relevant? If she miraculously learns to swallow -- I presume the court order doesn't forbid her parents to try feeing her -- what then?
Finally: the unthinkable, which prompted this subject. If we are going to let people die, but we want to avoid the responsibility -- "it's in God's hands now that we have removed the tubes" -- then -- then -- why? Is there a difference between starving someone to death (and allowing dehydration? or will they inject saline intravenously to keep that balance? or is that forbidden lest someone sneak in some glucose? -- is there a difference between starving someone to death and simply pumping in the morphine for one last rush and oblivion? And if there is such a difference, will someone explain it to me? Be certain you do not let religious arguments creep into your explanation.
I fear there is a decided lack of clear thinking on these matters. Which is not surprising. Victor Frankenstein would have understood. As did Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
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On the temperature of the Earth:
Clearly if we take equal quantities of hot and cold water, take their temperatures, pour them together, and measure the temperature of the result, the result will be pretty nearly the mathematical average of the measures we had before we started. This assumes that the two buckets were well stirred just before we took the temperatures: let them sit a while and where in the bucket we had the sensor can be important.
Now what is the temperature of the Earth? To 3 significant digits, .1 degree C, please.
Where do I put my sensors? Having placed them, and decided on the weights to give each measure I take, what happens if someone builds a big city near one of my measurement stations? There are unusual ocean currents this year? On what day of the year do I take my for the record measurements, or if I am averaging over a year, do I average all my dailies? And having got my temperature for the year 2001, and seeing a bunch of changes in the landscape and ocean currents, exactly what do I do to get a year 2005 measure that compares with my 2001 temperature?
And then I discover that someone else using a different heat capacity pattern model has come up with a different average for the year 2001.
Now: I do not pretend expertise in these matters. I do pretend some expertise in similar problems (what is the average temperature of re-entry? Does it make sense to combine a bunch of measures into a single figure of merit, and if so, what does that measure mean?).
There are two things to consider about a global average. The first is the operational definition of how it was obtained: will two independent teams get the same number to the required accuracy? If each does it twice will we have 4 identical (to 3 significant digits) measures? If not, what now?
That is the first definition of an average: the procedures used to obtain it.
The second is its interpretation: what does it all mean? What, for instance, does it mean to average the temperature at the South Pole, two sea level places on the Equator, two high mountain places on the Equator, and at the North Pole? It's an average in that I can tell you how I got it and how I arrived at the resulting number. Is it a meaningful average?
Throw in some more. Take the temperature of the ocean in the Marianas Trench. Throw in the temperature inside and outside Mauna Loa. Throw in Pinatubo, and heave in a few taken at high altitudes in various latitudes. Is it meaningful yet? What else might we do to give it more meaning?
And understand that while the absolute number may not be important, the number's variance from year to year will certainly be.
When people model Global Warming and come up with an average temperature of the Earth, and I ask how they got it and they don't really explain that, I get suspicious.
This all arose when Greg Cochran, for whom I have some respect, declared Essex and McIntyre as not worth listening to because they have said some things he took to be nonsense. Leaving out the possibility of being misquoted -- it has happened to both Cochran and myself -- it is not the case that questions asked are meaningless even when they come from a source you might not rely on for data? But leave that and conclude with Cochran that you may safely ignore anything Essex and McIntyre say on the grounds that anyone who says an RMS temperature is "just as good" as a linear average can't possibly know enough to be worth listening to. Questions about the Earth's Average Temperature remain.
Reporting an "average" without some discourse on how it was obtained and why that particular formulation is worth paying attention to does not impress me. If you want to tell me the Earth's temperature I want some assurance that your measure won't change next year because of some random factor.
We know the Earth's temperature over long periods of time to about 1.5 significant digits simply by history. Crop records, growing seasons, dairy farms in Greenland at one time and rivers frozen over solid enough to drag cannon across at another time, and so forth. Getting it closer than that takes a lot of assumptions. Even with recent measures we must make assumptions. How accurate were HMS Beagle's measures of ocean and air temperatures? I think they didn't do globe temperatures: should they have? (A globe temperature is useful in human factors work: it's the temperature inside a black copper globe of standard size, and thus is an average itself of air and radiant environment temperatures.) Globe temperatures change with cloud cover especially at night. Is that significant? And so forth.
A note on the above: taking an air temperature in a windy place can be tricky. In Pasadena a few years ago the temperature at the base of the mountains was exactly the same to 3 significant digits (fraction of a degree) for, I believe it was 37 consecutive hours. A Santa Ana Wind was pouring down the slope and the compressive heating produced that result. Elsewhere in the LA Basin there were variations as winds mixed. What was the average temperature of the LA Basin that day? Globe temperatures would have had day/night variations. Would that be important?
I do not envy climate scientists their job. I do wonder at their assurance when they begin rolling dice down the table in a Congressional hearing.
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