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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

> an assumption that goes away when the hospitals have to choose who lives and who dies.

I feel this sort of statement misrepresents the true problem and portrays deaths from lack of medical care as just a capricious choice made by cruel doctors and nurses. This portrsial is neither fair or truthful.

If you have 10 patients requiring a respirator and only a single respirator to spare, figuring out who is a priority or has a better chance of making it alive is not the same as deciding someone should die.

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Someone had mentioned recently that one of HN's biggest problems was overly pedantic responses get better upvotes rather than actual content. This has a caused HN to devolve into a fact correctness engine rather than a content engine. To be fair, this is something I've done in that past too.

Yes, I did use a rhetorical phrase to make a point, but one that's pretty prevalent in modern culture and especially when it comes to triage. Perhaps google phrases like "Doctors forced to play God", etc. Ironically, the first hit that comes up is this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163641/NHS-doctor-...

I really recommend that you go watch episodes of MASH from the 1980's. Particularly the episodes where the doctors have to triage cases that might be savable if they weren't in a field hospital. If the US president says we're in a war, we should all refresh ourselves up on what meatball surgery is during an actual war.

The objection is that the phrasing of a doctor playing God is extremely culturally potent in America, and far less on whether you are technically correct on the intersection of God and medicine.

And in public speech it's the public that determines meaning and not the speaker with their intentions. What the speaker gets to do is make predictions about how it will be received.

And this is exactly the pedantry I was talking about. You're arguing about the "way" I mead the point. Not about the argument itself.

As a public speaker engaged in public speech, you are responsible for getting the results you want. It would be silly for JK Rowling to blame people for not correctly interpreting her novels.

You are absolutely reaping your own fruits, but you are blaming others for your displeasing harvest.

Wow, all I did was use a phrase from popular culture, and now I feel I'm being speech shamed.

Sure, it's language used to discuss doctors in the context of abortion, euthanasia, and medical research relating to genetics. I wonder why people might focus on doctor playing God. Could some people actually be religious?

> in public speech it's the public that determines meaning and not the speaker

False dichotomy. It's a shared responsibility. Nothing gives the reader or responder the right to project their own biases or guesses of intention onto someone else's words and argue as though they'd been in the original. Please stop doing that.

I think no sufficiently intelligent person thinks that hospitals deciding who lives/dies will be done capriciously or by cruel doctors. But on the other hand there were large numbers of fools in the U.S. who thought the ACA would create death panels. So maybe for the U.S. your point is valid.

> think no sufficiently intelligent person thinks that hospitals deciding who lives/dies will be done capriciously or by cruel doctors.

The death panel political talking point suggests otherwise.

To me the statement "have to choose who lives and who dies" doesn't carry the meaning that the decision will be taken in a capricious way. In the end it's a horrible responsibility to decide somebody doesn't get a chance to live so that somebody else gets that chance. But that's the situation.

How would you write that, then?

It's reasonable to assume bb88 understands the nature of triage and was referring to that in a non-judgmental way.

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