>Refusing to improve early, probabilistic diagnosis because today’s treatments are modest confuses sequence with outcome.
While you're right from the perspective of humanity taking the steps of gathering data then tackling the disease, most developed countries have single payer healthcare systems that require some level of cost-benefit analysis to approve covering new diagnostic systems.
Alzheimer's disease progression doesn't seem to have any notable preventative indications other than 'eat well, exercise and stay mentally active', all of which are standard recommendations.
Recall that this isn't an issue deciding between funding and non-funding. It's an issue deciding between funding Alzheimer's diagnostics, new GMP agonists, new screening options for highly preventable cancers, etc. Building out a dataset is nice but unless that's surplus money redirected from other programs it's going to come at a real flesh and blood cost.
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
Slightly off topic, but this strategy of blaming a crisis on some other cause is pervasive. It's especially useful when you are the reason for the crisis.
For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.
A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.
This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.
>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.
But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.
When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.
America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
I feel like this was more accurate a long time ago when the first rounds of YCombinator hopefuls were all piling in here and nerding out. The vibe, tone, and content has dramatically shifted towards the finance and ambition side of tech over the years.
>Everyone here wants to look like the next Steve Jobs in front of YC, no one wants to look like Steve Wozniak.
I think it's interesting that this wasn't the vibe that was here around the time of the first few YC cohorts. Everyone posting here was chatting as if they wanted to embody the Richard Stallman/Wozniak prototypical hackerman. I think once YC grew and this became a place to network with successful industry insiders rather than tech savvy ultra-geeks doing it for the love of the game that the tone changed hard.
There were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density.
The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.
As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.
I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
>If anything, they'll need to rely on more expertise now, so they can craft laws that aren't open to interpretation.
Every law is open to interpretation. If tech can barely secure the doors on machines that execute instructions near-flawlessly, you think we can construct flawless frameworks out of inherently ambiguous linguistic building blocks run and understood by deeply human executors? This just plain doesn't work when the rubber meets the road.
Someone's going to make a choice, and SCOTUS just decided unilaterally that it's going to be a body that hasn't been able to decide anything productively for a decade.
This isn't about creating better structures for the analysis of rules; it's about gutting the regulatory capacity of agencies.
Not really. When performing clinical trials, if you'd like to use the results of the studies in chinese/indian populations you'll need to prove bioequivalence in many cases, so you're going to need to collect a meaningful sample in the first place.
The reality is that most clinical trials aren't successes. If you can get a huge cohort of people for relatively cheap elsewhere, you can screen a lot of promising but doomed tests at a cheaper price point, then only re-create similar testing on the most promising candidates in your lucrative markets.
What the grandparent post was referring to as "obvious reasons" must be the high prevalence of HIV in the study countries[0]. Why wouldn't they test in countries with the highest infection risk?
There may be common reasons to trial there like it being cheaper or less regulated. But there is a good reason for this specific medication to be tested in those specific countries. Criticizing the study authors for being "cheap" is uncalled for in this case.
I'm not sure developed countries are the most lucrative market for HIV vaccines. How many people would even get them and why? This is a product almost entirely developed for Sub-Saharan Africa so it only makes sense that they focus on testing it there?
Hard to say, maybe it's not inconceivable that ~1% of potential patients in the US/EU/etc. might end up paying more than > 50%-90% of the people living Sub-Saharan Africa for whom getting the vaccine would make a lot of sense.
Kinda? Lawyers are myopic, vain, and we don't really do much to innovate.
We wanted to make sure there would be no cross pollination between legal advisory services and other professional services in most jurisdictions, but the only thing that division did was significantly restrict our ability to widen our service offerings to provide more value.
The end result is that we protected our little nest egg while our share of the professional services pie has been getting eaten by consulting and multi-service accounting firms for the past 20 years.
While you're right from the perspective of humanity taking the steps of gathering data then tackling the disease, most developed countries have single payer healthcare systems that require some level of cost-benefit analysis to approve covering new diagnostic systems.
Alzheimer's disease progression doesn't seem to have any notable preventative indications other than 'eat well, exercise and stay mentally active', all of which are standard recommendations.
Recall that this isn't an issue deciding between funding and non-funding. It's an issue deciding between funding Alzheimer's diagnostics, new GMP agonists, new screening options for highly preventable cancers, etc. Building out a dataset is nice but unless that's surplus money redirected from other programs it's going to come at a real flesh and blood cost.
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