demagogue on 15/5/2013 at 14:29
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Quote:
Also, crowd-sourcing isn't an illegitimate means to pay for anything so long as the crowd knows what they are funding.
As much as I hate the obvious cash-grabs or people with exisitng fame / sources of investment (ab)using it, I have to agree. In the end, as long as they're honest, they should be allowed to ask for (which is different from "get") the money. Heck, men have been doing that for thousands of years; it's called Beggers 2.0
I bailed on this thread because it's almost not worth stretching it out. But I'll explain what I meant. I wasn't questioning the fact people can ask disinterested parties for money generally.
The problem with the original proposal is that it was ostensibly an issue of medical dispute on complex issues of risk that (if she were being honest) ostensibly even experts didn't agree on. Making good decisions on complex and uncertain risks like that, you need a LOT of information and good risk analysis, which is usually best done by suits reading a dossier thicker than your arm and not normal Joes reading purple prose. So when a decision of that complexity is left to purple prose, you can almost guarantee there will be waste somewhere, so much so that it really shouldn't be allowed as a matter of policy. That's why I used the word illegitimate; it's just not the right way to get the right money to the right risks, even when we're talking about charity. We didn't have enough information in the original proposal to have any grounding whatsoever what this money was for to make it anything better than a pure lottery at best (maybe the surgery is needed, maybe it isn't; the info in the proposal gave us a coin flip). I mean you can't even properly decide if it's honest or fraudulent in meeting your first requirement ("the crowd knows what they're paying for") if you can't even understand what the risk is, if it's closer to 95% or 0.001%.
Actually I think gender reassignment surgery or something even like cosmetic surgery are *good* uses of crowdfunding (as long as people know that's what the money is going to, like you say), because it's transparent and you don't need a dossier thicker than your arm to know what good its for since there's no disputed risk involved, no complex risk analysis or expertise needed. You know exactly what the money is doing & that it will do its job.
tl;dr. I just meant to say some types of financing shouldn't be open to crowdfunding IMO, even when they're being truthful... the kind involving a lot of uncertainty, risk & dispute that take a lot of information & expertise to even understand what the money is (or isn't) really doing. But funding transparent things where people know exactly what the money is for are fine.
faetal on 15/5/2013 at 14:56
That's a good reason for why crowd-funding would be a bad idea if treated as a default, but since it is ad hoc, you can argue that anyone reading a pledge ought to employ their own scepticism rather than dismiss the pledge system as a poor way to raise money for complex issues. A lot of people were iffy about this pledge because of the vagueness of "metal poisoning".
It's still voluntary, so anyone who wants to give their money based on purple prose is doing so because they believe the prose. It shouldn't even be an issue with medical care since no one should have to pay for it, but when you have a situation as fucked up as the US, things like this are an inevitability. So yeah, there will be people trying to game the system, but as with anything of that nature, after it happens x number of times, people will employ scepticism more and a gradient will phase itself in whereby a threshold of evidence will be required before people hand over their $.
As with KS, barring certain "OMG famous dev!!!" cases, no video / screenshots / well-developed concept usually means far fewer people will pledge. If there ever was a "pay my medical bills" equivalent, I can imagine that the consensus would tend towards creation of a similar standard for support being likely. A medical bill crowd-funding platform would likely end up being run like a charity, where case files are only even approved after a case manager has been over the medical notes.
So while I agree broadly with your point that expert opinion shouldn't be bypassed, I'd summarise with:
1) So long as it isn't auto-funded (like with taxes), then the onus is on each individual to decide what to trust.
2) After a critical number of scams, the overall trust threshold (and by extension, the mechanism have a chance to successfully fund the full amount) would increase to the point where there'd need to a formalised validation process for claims.
Now that I've typed all of that - I just think "fuck it, give everywhere a proper NHS and be done with it".
Jason Moyer on 15/5/2013 at 16:37
I don't want to be a pedantic dick but...I'm going to be a pedantic dick. There's a difference between crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding. A pretty substantial one.
faetal on 15/5/2013 at 16:55
That's my fault for using them interchangeably - which one do I want?
Jason Moyer on 15/5/2013 at 16:58
Crowd-funding is when the masses are funding the development/etc, crowd-sourcing is when everyone is contributing to the project itself by writing code, creating assets, etc. So yeah, you mean crowd-funding.
DDL on 15/5/2013 at 17:21
What about crowdsourcing funds?
(Or crowdfunding sources? :p)
EDIT: more seriously, crowdsourcing has been used to describe situations where everyone is contributing incredibly minimal (albeit non-monetary) resources, rather than actual technical expertise, like all those distributed protein-folding algorithms/SETI@home things and stuff, so it's not entirely clear-cut.
(though admittedly those uses could also have been incorrect, so hey)
faetal on 15/5/2013 at 17:58
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Crowd-funding is when the masses are funding the development/etc, crowd-sourcing is when everyone is contributing to the project itself by writing code, creating assets, etc. So yeah, you mean crowd-funding.
Ok, makes sense now - cheers for the clear up.
Mr.Duck on 15/5/2013 at 18:50
Quote Posted by dethtoll
i thought that was duck
[video=youtube;F0m52n8NGpY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0m52n8NGpY[/video]
:cool:
Yakoob on 16/5/2013 at 02:58
Quote Posted by demagogue
The problem with the original proposal is that it was ostensibly an issue of medical dispute on complex issues of risk that (if she were being honest) ostensibly even experts didn't agree on. Making good decisions on complex and uncertain risks like that, you need a LOT of information and good risk analysis, which is usually best done by suits reading a dossier thicker than your arm and not normal Joes reading purple prose. So when a decision of that complexity is left to purple prose, you can almost guarantee there will be waste somewhere, so much so that it really shouldn't be allowed as a matter of policy. That's why I used the word illegitimate; it's just not the right way to get the right money to the right risks, even when we're talking about charity. We didn't have enough information in the original proposal to have any grounding whatsoever what this money was for to make it anything better than a pure lottery at best (maybe the surgery is needed, maybe it isn't; the info in the proposal gave us a coin flip). I mean you can't even properly decide if it's honest or fraudulent in meeting your first requirement ("the crowd knows what they're paying for") if you can't even understand what the risk is, if it's closer to 95% or 0.001%.
Yes, but shouldn't it be up to the individual "donor" to decide if the cause is legitimate / trustworthy enough and provides sufficient info to consider backing?
Oh wait, people are dumb. Hence the dilemma ... :p
(also, as I said, while I can get behind being able to ask for money for this, I totally respect anyone decision not to back it for the reasons you outline dema. Heck, I'm not sure if I would have myself if it didn't get scrapped really quickly)
faetal on 16/5/2013 at 07:30
If this plea had come from the UK or France etc... I'd have thought that she was just someone trying to get unnecessary or unproven treatment that had been refused for legit reasons (like people with breast cancer without the HER2 mutation campaigning to be put on herceptin because it has a good success rate in people with the HER2 mutation and they don't get the difference). But when it happens in the US, it's easier to believe that she's being refused treatment for less scientific reasons.
