Carissa Véliz

but the one field that has a little bit of literature on prediction is medicine because when people come into the hospital and there are scarce resources often you have to choose who do you treat first and you often make that decision on the basis of a prediction who has more of a chance to live and one example comes from real life I once knew someone who was a paramedic in Spain

and he was once transporting an organ donor and this person started having spontaneous heartbeat and the paramedic called their boss and the boss said that is not a patient that is an organ donor and essentially what went on there was once you are declared dead

that is in itself a prediction.

It's a prediction that you won't come back to life, that you are beyond help and that your body has given out.

And once that has been determined, you are as good as dead, no matter what happens, because the system has already allocated your organs to someone else.

And the interesting thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they don't create error signals.

They're like the perfect crime.

They're like a murder weapon that disappears upon striking.

Because we will never have the data on the patients that we didn't prioritize.

They will be dead and that data will never get collected.

And of course, this is a very sensitive topic because health professionals are not trying to kill people, right?

They are making very, very tough decisions on the basis of predictions with sometimes a lot of uncertainty.

But it is a very good example because it happens every day, because it's very tangible how high the stakes can be, and because it also makes it obvious how we don't have the necessary data to make sure that our predictions are not creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

No, we're not.

No, we're not when we want their organs.

So here is the dilemma.

The freshest organs you can get are from people who are alive.

but of course that would be highly unethical.

So you want to get the organs as soon as someone is dead, but death is not a biological event.

It's partly a philosophical decision about when do we consider someone dead?