Many sports gambling companies do this, weighing the bets of "sharps" (people who are more accurate than the average) heavier than other bets. A good example of this was Mayweather vs McGregor where a lot of sharps were betting on Mayweather whereas the public was betting more on McGregor. Even with about 80% of people betting on McGregor, the house still had Mayweather as a favorite.
Thats a different phenomenon than what I was discussing, but a really interesting one. Nate Silver discussed the topic with Tyler Cowen and said many platforms ban sharps, but then look to other platforms that allow them to benchmark their own odds.
I think the analogous situation to what I was proposing would be if a platform had open betting and organic odds, but sold the sharp betting data to 3rd parties.
Personally I don't get on a high horse about it and just deal with it, but if the person ahead of me reclines I lose leg room that me reclining does not give back.
I agree, not saying aphantasia isn't real but I think a lot of it is misunderstanding of those who think phanatasia is closing your eyes and "seeing" things. In an engineering class where I had to make drawings from multiple angles I would rotate it in my mind and draw it, I can can close my eyes and visualize walking around my childhood home, and I can visualize snap shots of important memories of my life. However, I don't "see" it in any sense of what it is like when my eyes are open, not even close really.
Same thing happened to me about 6 years ago. Told me to relax and not eat spicy foods. Makes me wonder how long medical advancements like this take to really spread to most doctors.
For example, several years ago significant cataract improvement was achieved by applying to eyes lanasterol (chemical in your body clearing cataract naturally) with DMSO (well known widely used solvent which is used in particular to deliver various medicine through the skin, etc., and some adventurous people are also using it to for example deliver dye into eyes to change the eye color). Several other scientific teams at different places tried to reproduce the result by applying lanasterol without DMSO, and no improvement happened. They concluded that the original study effect is non-reproducible and that the application of lanasterol is non-effective. I'm not kidding - you can google these articles yourselves.
Of course, as lanosterol is how your body does it when things work ok on their own. The issue is delivery, and for unknown reason they are doing it without DMSO or anything similar. Lanosterol with its large molecular weight have no chances of making it inside on its own. The other way of course is injecting it directly into the eye, and it probably would have to be done many times, and, once injections stop, the crystalline accumulation may happen to start again (as cataracts indicate that the body probably have some issue producing and delivering lanosterol naturally), ie. cataract returning, and in this case the cataract surgery starts to look like not that bad of an approach solving the issue once and for all.
>Medicine advances so slowly.
This is one on my deepest existential fears - not just in medicine - the Ancient Greeks could have had steam turbine based ships, yet it took more than 2000 years, and i'm wondering with a tint of fear what wonderful things we're missing on and what Dark Ages we have to pass through before getting to those things (and i'm not going to see them being long gone before it). The high-tech with AI, etc. is the only area where i feel that the progress has at least some minimally reasonable speed (or at least it is hardly reasonable to ask Nature for something faster than the Moore law), and if it were in high-tech there would be already 10 start-ups funded by at least $100M each perfecting and productizing the combinations of DMSO+lanosterol and exploring the similar approaches :) Unfortunately it seems there is no money here, and the Robin Warren's discovery didn't make him a billionaire.
the bigger problem is that if society collapses again there are few easily-accessible resources anymore, particularly fuel/energy. Consider the coincidence of factors that led to the industrial age in Britain… some of those can’t be reproduced again.
Mining garbage dumps for resources could of course be a thing, but probably not abundant energy.
This time there is no plan B. We either become an interplanetary species or this planet eventually becomes our tomb. Probably a couple millennia.
well, may be civilization would be much better off if we went straight to electrified industrial society using wind and hydro energy bypassing burning of dinosauruses - windmills and watermills were known for millennia, one only had to add copper winding and some magnetic iron, the things available for the last 2000+ years.
> We either become an interplanetary species or this planet eventually becomes our tomb.
Yes, only my version of the "tomb" is that it would be our planetary scale ant city/colony as we become totally connected and our societies naturally become highly totalitarian (not necessarily due to some ideology, you'd just naturally have less and less space/resources/opportunities for your private endeavors). Some ant colonies exist uninterrupted for several thousand years, no progress, just happy busy ants doing their happy stuff. Only few of us who'd get off that planet will have a chance to continue the civilizational progress. Kind of bifurcation of our species. Interesting that Musk advances our civilization in both directions - neural implants as well as SpaceX.
How do you get the prerequisites for solar without access to large amounts of energy? Solar cells are made from silicon wafers which must be refined and doped to work. Maybe we could build windmills if we salvage copper and magnets, but refining even copper would be challenging without access to high heat fossil fuels. I guess you would have to bootstrap using charcoal, which would be very labor intensive.
Photovoltaics are not the only form of solar electricity production. Concentrated thermal solar power can easily get into the hundreds of megawatts range.
Well, you’re not going to find centuries of easily-accessible fuel by raiding gas stations. Good luck drilling natural gas two miles under the gulf with your renaissance era mineshafts.
More specifically Max Planck wrote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ..."
How long medical advancements take to spread, and also how long the ineffective or outright harmful practices persist.
I guess on HN we're all relatively pro-science. But the world would be a better place if we recognised that our scientific knowledge in some areas is poorer than we like to pretend.
I started feeling that way when I worked alongside some "Evidence-Based Medicine" advocates. Years later I've landed in data science and the standards of statistical analysis and understanding I see especially in the biological sciences has only made me more sceptical.
Way back in 2007 the BMJ as part of its Clinical Evidence project published its systematic research into standards of evidence in support of common medical treatments. Some 2500 treatments were evaluated to determine whether they are supported by sufficient reliable evidence.
• 13% were found to be beneficial.
• 23% were likely to be beneficial.
• 8% were as likely to be harmful as beneficial.
• 6% were unlikely to be beneficial.
• 4% were likely to be harmful or ineffective.
• 46% were unknown whether they were efficacious or harmful.
It's quite hard to find the original Clinical Evidence project resources (might be a job for the wayback machine) but you can find it referenced all over, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2071976/ .
In the 1970s the US Office of Technology Assessment conducted a similar evaluation of medical treatments' efficacy and found that only 10% to 20% of medical treatments had evidence of efficacy. I would love to see more recent research in this vein.
There are clearly many complications and caveats around all this. Not all "common treatments" are easily studied -- the gold standard of the RCT is not always feasible or ethical. And of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, etc... but it sometimes feels we should be a bit more humble about even our best science.
Continuing education in medicine is a big problem. Once someone graduates med school, their knowledge mostly freezes. The good ones keep up on latest developments but some don't.
That’s “translational medicine” or “translational science” —> getting lab proven stuff to the bedside.
And yeah, it can take a while.
My dream is to a have a dumb doctor/mechanic/plumber/blah that just researches even the most basic questions unless it’s something really odd-ball and only then defaulting to their “expert opinion”.
I've thought for a long time that medicine in the AI era would end up with nurses being even more important than they are today but with doctors being drastically less so. (I know next to nothing about healthcare; this is just a guess!)
This is a problem with alot of thirdwirld surgery. If some old doctor gets to operate your appendix, he might gut you like fish,like they did back in the 80s, scar from heart to hip.not even due to missing equipment but a lack of schooling and experience on newer techniques.
I went to an ear doctor recently, who was so old that I think he graduated when I was a toddler. But when I describe my symptom he says "Well, let's also see what ChatGPT says."
So some part of new medical information might spread faster than I had thought.
* My ear problem turned out to be that my ear canal was full of wax. I guess we didn't really need ChatGPT that day.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unless things have changed fundamentally since I was in medical school (UCLA Class of 1974), a doctor's visit should start with taking a history and move on to a physical examination. I would think ChatGPT wouldn't even have been mentioned once your PE revealed a wax-filled external ear canal.
I also failed a lot of tests and I like to think that I am currently a good engineer. Frankly I do not see much overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs. what I do at work besides lab work and projects, which were the things I did do good in.
> I do not see much overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs. what I do at work
Many engineers manage to avoid using any of the tools (such as math) they learned in school and just wing it. You can often get things to work that way, but they'll be inefficient and more expensive.
I remember an EE who was trying to reduce the noise in a circuit. He tried adding random parts for days, with no success. Finally a real engineer looked at it, did a calculation, stuck the right capacitor in and solved it.
Honestly, after giving and taking a lot of advice in my life, I think the problem is people have something (A) they want to do in a situation, they then ask all their friends / family / mentors for advice, and even if 9/10 say to do B, they listen to the one person who says to do A. So it's not that people don't listen to advice, they just shop around and listen to somebody's advice that fits the desires they already have.
This has lead me to think the best thing you can do for yourself is to just ask a select few people who you really trust for advice. You still might not listen but at least you'll go into a decision knowing you're not listening to any of the advice you received.
