Orthodontic procedures generally pay off in the long run. Straight teeth and an aligned bite are typically more functional. Straight teeth are easier to clean and preserve.

In many EU countries health insurance pays for them because a long term financial argument can easily be made.

Bad teeth can cause severe health issues and get expensive later in life.

'Naturally' or 'natural' is a poor argument to make about not caring for the elderly.

If the elderly is not able to walk, eat, or think, then they're sick or disabled. It doesn't matter if you are 80 or 20 years old.

Or we could get our shit together and classify aging as a treatable disease and spend an adequate amount of research dollars on finding a cure.

Edit: This view might be radical on HN, but while I do believe that we can fix ageing and that eventually someone will, I am not quite sure if we really should.

Let's say the NIH values a year of life at X. There is a 90 year old and a 10 year old who need the same treatment that costs 10X. We should be much more willing to give the treatment to the 10 year old because he has a much better chance of 'earning back the investment', whereas statistically, the 90 year old is overwhelmingly likely to die in the next 10 years.

So, your maths is incorrect, try "5x the cost". But I take your point.

First of all, 10X is not a factor of age! "X" was meant as an arbitrary monetary unit, and the cost is the same 10X for both the kid and the 90 year old.

Second, "returning the investment" doesn't mean "reaching 100 years old". It just means "getting more years of life for the same cost".

Even if the boy lived only to 30 or 40, he still lived 20 or 30 years, whereas for the 90 year old living up to 100 or 110 would be extremely rare.

We spend more on dog food than we do on millions of patients.

So, no, it's not a question of "finite resources".

Or, rather, it would be, if we were anywhere near exhausting our resources.

When the NIH (or equivalent) turn that into a C/expected number of years, they're doing a scarce resource allocation problem. Unless you have infinite resources to give every patient every available treatment, you have to do allocation somehow.

Giving a 10-year old a treatment that you'd deny a 90-year old seems perfectly sane and rational to me.

I can't tell if you're agreeing with the concept and just disagreeing with the terminology, or if you believe there's a fundamentally better way?

I literally cannot figure out where your math went off the rails.

On top of that, this is also dangerous from a social perspective where people could get a feeling that they are supposed to go once there is nothing they can contribute to society anymore.

We should rather focus on allowing making "regular" dying more dignified rather than promoting euthanasia.

I have seen a few old people live beyond their time and wait for death though. It is quite harsh and undignified. "I am just so tired and I want to go."

You have to consider first of all that we're working with scarce resources. When we're not, it's not even an issue to compare two lives if you can save them both. But in the case that there are limited resources and you happen to have to choose between focusing on two different groups of people and make that tradeoff, you inevitably have to base your decision on something.

Now if you have a 15 year old kid and an 80 year old person, and both are dying from some preventable disease at a rate of 1% per year, and you have a scarce budget to focus on researching one particular disease, which one do you choose to focus on?

Well flipping a coin is probably shit. But making a ranking based on qualify adjusted life years[0] probably makes more sense. Of course it's not perfect, but it's not beyond offensive if you ask me to go about reasoning like this to partially inform policy decisions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

That is, why do people tend to be more sad when a kid has cancer than an old person? A child hasn't had decades to interact with and influence other people's lives. In terms of the sadness inflicted if someone were to die, an older person will have affected hundreds of lives, built things, had families, etc.

A child hasn't really impacted anyone except their parents.

I feel there's an underlying attitude that older people have had their time, and it's only right that a young person gets their chance.

But I'm not at all sure if that's true, and I wonder how much of this conversation is based on an assumption that we haven't explored verywell.

Your question also touches on abortion, and the argument that a fetus deserves less protection from society because of its lack of social connection. http://www.equip.org/article/steven-pinkers-evolutionary-exp...

But you touch on a deeper question also: "saving lives" is a very modern idea. Traditionally, death was quote common all all corners of society, and the solution was to make more new people.

I think back in the times when child deaths were common, it was less hard to handle.

These issues I suspect are very rife for post-hoc rationalisation around gut-feelings of morality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YL3LT1ZvOM

Bill Gates turns 60 this year. It's pretty safe to assume he'll accomplish more in the next 20 years than you will in your lifetime.

What kind of question is this? You think we have infinite medical researchers with infinite resources and infinite budgets? All countries, including the richest ones, have budgets.

> Bill Gates turns 60 this year. It's pretty safe to assume he'll accomplish more in the next 20 years than you will in your lifetime.

Oh god you can't really think that's a good argument, can you? Citing Gates as your anecdotal evidence to make a point about policy that affects millions of people is outright silly. It's like saying government policy should prevent people from going to university, and dropping out once they get in, because hey Bill Gates did it and look how that turned out. Why refer to one of the most extreme outliers in modern history as a justification for medical policy for completely different, average people?

I don't even get what your point is. I made the point that it probably makes more sense to save 1% of 15 year olds (or 25 year olds for that matter, considering the other post on how children distort our perspective of morality), than 1% of 80 year olds, or 60 year olds for that matter, given a common situation of scarce resources and the need to make a trade off. (again in cases where resource scarcity doesn't matter, the discussion is irrelevant).

If you want to counter that with the point that 'but some 60 year olds are still productive, look at bill gates, his impact will be tremendous the next decades' then you fail to see how statistically that 60 year old may have already been dead 35 years earlier, and that statistically for every bill gates you'd save at 60, in this hypothetical situation, you'd give up a younger bill gates who now dies at 25, and it may be said that despite his tremendous impact late in life, it doesn't rival his impact earlier in life, and that this (having more impact before 60 than after 60) probably holds true on average, generally speaking. No amount of anecdotal evidence changes that fact.

The point is that you don't need to give up a younger Bill Gates for an older one.

As for the impact of his accomplishments, I think we'll need to wait until the end to evaluate it. You could argue that saving millions of lives and offering tens of millions better, healthier lives is more impactful.

Money is a claim on future productivity. Spending it causes people in the world to adjust what they're doing to satisfy what you're asking for. Most of our claims aren't very large though, so this isn't particularly noticeable except in aggregate.