AlphaOne1 · HackerTrans

2 years agodiscuss

I also thing the marketing release contradicts the terms of the cleared status by the FDA. The FDA specifically says this is not for screening or diagnosis. So essentially what does this device actually help with? A physician needs to be suspecting something abnormal with a lesion before using. If it is "negative" would a physician really want to trust a device in the off chance it misses a melanoma? If I were a family doctor and was suspicious of a lesion enough to use this device, wouldn't it make more sense to send to derm or just go ahead an biopsy?

AlphaOne1

2 years agodiscuss

I could be wrong, but this device is FDA cleared which is not the same as FDA approved. Title is a little misleading.

AlphaOne1

3 years agodiscuss

Interesting idea. I have recently been reading John C. Bogle's work (of Vanguard fame) and he seems to be of the opinion, from my interpretation, that short term speculation will have disasterious consequences for the Stock Market and that we need a sort of Sin Tax to discourage such behavior. Your idea would track with that.

AlphaOne1

3 years agodiscuss

Your comment reminded me about a discussion G.K Chesterton has in "Orthodoxy" on madness. My take is that when facts and information is divorced from experience we risk being unmoored from reality:

> If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst for it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

[0] https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodo...

AlphaOne1

3 years agodiscuss

Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but I think going forward critical thinking as well as an understanding of what to value is going to be important for future generations. Something that computers will never be good at doing is 'understanding' what is valuable in life since many times this cannot be measured. In essence, a healthy understanding of the three transcendentals the Good the True, and the Beautiful will be essential to keep our humanity. ChatGPT can perform many amazing skills but lacks the ability to accurately judge the value of what is it reporting. I think passing on a love for the transcendentals to our children is the only way to inoculate them from the firehose of 'junk' information ChatGP et al is about to unleash on the world.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

For all of the old Microsoft's faults, they really did an excellent job with backwards compatibility. Now things are a mess and I fear that you are right. It really isn't the developers fault imo. OS really should be more stable.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

I would argue because no charity was given to opinions contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the NIH declaired as truth. Perhaps most infamous is Dr. Collins asking for a takedown of the Great Berington declaration. The fact that so little was certain early on about COVID should have been a reason to allow physicians and scientists to discuss and debate policy without fear of having their careers destroyed. Now that we are further out from the pandemic cooler heads will prevail but I fear the damage to the reputation of the health authorities in the US will take a long time to recover.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/23/at-a-time-when-the-u-s-n...

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

Vinay Prasad, MD (Heme/Onc) gives a very good rundown on why this trial is so important. He also points out why having accurate data for screening recommendations is so crucial. USPTF has been making recommendations recently without data to back up them up and get appropriately taken to task for that.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SMRS4-ng8T0

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

The title of this article reminded me of a thought provoking book by GK Chesterton, "The Everlasting Man", obviously he write from a religious perspective but one discussion raised a question that I had not considered before. Why do we assume primitive man was any less intelligent or artistic than we are now?

"Human civilization is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. [..] In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilization or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness;" [1]

[1]https://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlastin...

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

I always said that the public health official must be absolutely certain they that all of the vaccines they were pushing are as safe and effective as they claimed before even considering mandating them. We now know they were wrong about at least one of them: the J&J vaccine is no longer being offered in my health system both because it's questionable safety profile and the fact that it is not as effective. Once we start preventing children from entering schools and removing people from their jobs (some with decades of experience) for not wanting to take a vaccine, the burden of proof is on the health officials to prove they are right. We also must remember that these measures have second order effects. I fear by abusing the trust the public had in physicians, public health officials have cause possibly permanent damage to the trust the average citizen has for the health community (this is especially pronounced among the underserved community).

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation and they are still responsible for the debt if they are not successful. I don't blame students for being resentful but I think the resentment needs to be directed at the correct source of the problem: higher education, rather than blaming businesses for not paying enough money to pay off a 100K student loan debt. I think it is a tragedy that we live in a society where you are viewed as 'less than' if one does not go to college. This view takes advantage of our emotions and leads some to go to college without a plan and load up on debt without a clear plan on what they will do with their life. Just to be clear, some people should definitely go to college but the current situation kids being told practically from birth (my evidence is the popularity of 529 funds parents/grandparents set up) that they need to attend college is ridiculous.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be subjective based on the background and skill level of who is watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by looking at the comments since many times you can gather the flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also, content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

Thanks for sharing, I just finished watching the video and found it very interesting. I was not aware how many states don't have any licensing requirements which really makes me question why we have so many licensing laws. Do you know if there have been any studies showing a change in pay based on the presence of license? I remember talking to a medical technician who moved from a state with licensing laws and he said he did take a pay cut but still was glad he moved.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

The question that needs to asked though is: what would you do with that information? Would you be willing to undergo biopsy (which is the standard for diagnosis) knowing there is a non-zero risk of complication. What if the biopsy is not conclusive? Do we then do a major surgery which includes risk of death? Imaging is NOT diagnostic for tumors. For most lesions, you have to take tissue samples.

Disclosure: I'm a pathologist.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

I wonder if there is a difference between oral stories and movies. My kids started to cry while watching the Little Dinosaur (ages 5 and under) several months ago. I recently bought a copy of the uncensored Brother Grim stories. Taking into account how sensitive they have been in the past with G rated cartoons, I decided I would edit the stories in real time (leaving out words like 'blood') and sometimes modify the ending slightly. Recently, I stopped editing the stories. My kids still love the stories and ask me to read them more right before bed time. They even asked me to re-read them Hansel and Gretel, which is quite a brutal tale in my opinion. Show them a single clip of a 'sad/scary' cartoon and they still freak out to this day; however.

I think there is something to be said about Disney cartoons use of music and visual images that sort of forces viewers into a certain emotional mindset. Oral stories/books on the other hand leave it up to the imagination of the listener to conger up the emotions and images. Not sure if this makes sense, but at least in the case of my kids it does.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

Do you have a citation for this? Very interesting and would like to look into this more.

AlphaOne1

4 years agodiscuss

I also think the complete implosion of family medicine has made this worse. In the past, you would keep the same family medicine doctor for decades and trust them. They in turn would know what your values and priorities are. Moreover, they would be able to guide you through difficult healthcare decisions that inevitably come up (cancer diagnosis, mental health etc.). We have lost the human connection aspect of medicine and those few physicians that are able to hang on to it are burning out due to the massive amounts of paperwork they need to accomplish. From the hospital perspective, (which many physicians now work for) good paperwork=good patient care. Paperwork is measurable. Relationships (other than in the abstract) are not.