The Pandemic Hotline (6:16) ~ AwakenWithJP

submitted by JasonCarswell from youtube.com

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newinsightfulfun

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

R E A L

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

There's two inconsistencies, one, most exercise doesn't compare to your basal metabolic rate, so unless you're mountain climbing or doing Iron Man competitions, you're fat because those two sodas you drank had more calories than all the work you did at the gym.

Second, programmers have to diagnose problems in extremely complex systems. You know, like the human body. It's kinda something doctors should probably be required to learn and be rated on. If they can't do that, they probably won't be able to diagnose you successfully unless it's super simple and they learned about it in the one class they took whose knowledge was 25 years out of date.

But other than that it was funny.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Speaking as someone whose profession lies at the intersection of programming and medicine (on the math/programming side, but I work closely with biologists/clinicians), I would say that the two are very different but complementary skill sets. It's true that programmers diagnose complex problems, but they have the luxury of collecting (in principle if not in practice) arbitrarily dense information streams about the problems they are addressing. On the other hand, biologists and clinicians are extremely limited in the timing and scale of the information they can collect about a live human or animal. I would never presume to tell a clinician what they should be doing, in the same way I would hope they would not presume to tell me how I should approach a problem mathematically or with what code.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I think doctors should be held to a higher standard. If they can't look through 200,000 lines of code, which is the size of an online text based MUD, and fix a bug then how well do you think they can figure out a human body.

I've been very disappointed in my doctors. If I don't both figure out the solution AND fight their egos about having a mere patient do the work they should have done in the first place I probably would actually have a good diagnosis in 18 years instead of some asshole orthopedic surgeon telling me I probably just did the wrong exercises. And all the rest of them who failed.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Some doctors are shit (and a close family member told me as much when she was in medical school). Some programmers are also shit.

Keep in mind a number of contextual factors. One is the time pressure that PCPs face, as upper level hospital/group management increasingly impose ridiculous expectations on the ability to diagnose and treat in very short patient visits. Another is the increasing automation of healthcare delivery, which on the surface sounds great (who doesn't like the sound of Evidence Based Medicine) but in practice limits the clinician's ability to use intuition based on years of practice and instead forces them to conform to algorithms that may be unable to account for very nuanced situations [acknowledging, as in my first point, that some physicians' intuitions are shit]. Yet another issue is the very nonlinear kinetics and dynamics involved, beyond the reach of algorithmic approaches to address since algorithms are typically shit at evaluating whole systems (this is where the inability to collect dense information becomes important) [as an aside please don't tell me about machine learning algorithms that could more holistically account for nonlinear dynamics, the information sources to train such systems aren't there yet and even if they were this space is heavily subject to regulation.]

Point being is that they are different skills. I enjoy learning from biologists/clinicians, how they think about problems, what they know about very complex systems (maybe I have the privilege of working with really intelligent ones). The good biologists/clinicians enjoy learning from me, what I think about the analysis of biological data.

None of this changes my opinion about how certain epidemiologists have botched the covid response. But personally I think this was by design, not by accident.