jmde

I think direct care models, in all but name, are probably coming. I might be wrong, but the way federal governance in the US is headed it seems increasingly rather than decreasingly likely.

In our region there are already hospital systems that are owned as subsidiaries by corporations that also own insurance companies. These corporations are gobbling up smaller hospitals as those merge and then subsequently get purchased by regional systems.

The monopoly in the provision is problematic enough, but it reaches new levels of problems when they are also merging with insurance companies.

So for some people, even if they aren't getting direct care technically, they are, because their choices are limited geographically for all intents and purposes to one provider, and their insurance is coming from the same provider.

The challenge these direct care models faced, as alluded to by other posters, is in competing with conglomerates that offer a complete spectrum of care. You either cater to people who can afford it, or have to lower costs enough to make it reasonable for people who might not otherwise. The first option limits your customer base; the second is not really currently feasible given government regulation and how it inhibits competition in delivery models.

I worry about the future of health care in the US, only because I don't see the GOP implementing anything other than the not-too distant status quo, which was broken. I sympathize with their stated ideal of reducing costs and increasing competition, but it seems like doublepeak for reducing costs and decreasing competition for established financial interests and increasing competition for everyone else. The net effect will just be squeezing more and more money out of the common individual.

Reasonable point, but I'd argue that the purchasers of dedicated cameras are already not the general market, who will just be using their phone camera anyway. For purchasers of these cameras, I think the cameramakers going down this route would be a clear signal that they care about the users' freedom of speech and security concerns and are taking their use seriously.

Also, my guess is compared to other features they work on this would be fairly trivial, or at least in the same ballpark. And I think it would immediately give the camera a certain cache that would signal "professional" or "serious" that would increase its value, regardless of whether or not the user really needs it.

Without meaning to be dismissive of the large numbers of people who do need these types of cameras (I have close loved ones who are professional photojournalists who rely on having the best cameras), I think a large proportion of people who who buy them don't need them relative to what's on decent phones today. They're just a status symbol for them anyway.

Bingo. The fact this is one of the two most popular TED talks says volumes about TED, and how to interpret TED vis-a-vis the broader scientific community.

I started reading the essay not knowing what to think, and it turned out to be more relevant to my work than I thought.

The issues being discussed in the essay have been a central issue in some area of psychology and behavioral sciences for some time--how to interpret components such as these.

One thought about your "coming into focus at a certain level of compression" comment: I've done some analyses of these vectors as applied to text samples, and one thing that struck me was how unreplicable some of them were across datasets that should be ostensibly similar (but are not the same). Others, in contrast, reappeared across multiple corpora. To the extent some of these components represent "real" features, they should reappear consistently across different datasets where you'd expect them to. That is, they should be robust to changes in idiosyncratic features of the database.

Whole fields have been devoted to defining science; I don't think experiment is necessary to the scientific endeavor. Experiments in many fields, for example, often suffer from problems related to generalizability or applicability to real-world scenarios. It's a major reason for observational science, although not the only one. Problems with replicability have also been shown to be just as endemic to fields dominated by experiments as those more influenced by observation, if not more so, across different scales of analysis from the molecular to the societal.

I think a better definition of what science is is broader, something like "logical argument based on empirical observations," although that too isn't right. I think the appeal of experiments is in line with that, to the extent that you accept that the experimental rationale involves a logical argument pertaining to randomization over potential confounds.

The underlying problem being discussed in the article, to me, is the denial by scientists that science is fundamentally a human endeavor, subject to all the problems of humans: things like greed, deceit, ideology, and so forth. Scientists like to pretend that they are somehow above all that, which means they pretend it doesn't exist, which makes the effects of human weaknesses in science all the more insidious. We see this play out with the problems in academics, financial conflicts of interest, and so forth.

What happens is that a certain cultural subgroup, already primed to be skeptical of science through their social context, recognizes the human weaknesses of science. They then make the mistake of rejecting science wholesale because of this. Scientists, in turn, often make the mistake of rejecting the notion of human influences on science, thereby placing undue confidence in their conclusions, leading to a lack of accountability or explanation when failures occur. Some degree of evolution in scientific theory is due to random variation, or lack of appropriate data, but some of it is due to human factors.

This was one of my first thoughts--these are extremely, extremely low base-rate events with not much measurement power. People mess with the surveys, or simply fail to understand the questions, or make mistakes in responding. The combination of them makes extrapolating very difficult. This was an internet sample too, and biased in that regard (which the authors acknowledge). It was interesting to me to read, though.

I think the bigger question for me, aside from this, are the benefits and costs associated with any response.

Even if you redid this and found that the likely percent of noncitizen voters was nonzero, you'd have to balance the benefits of any enforcement strategy against its costs.

Given that respondents were also saying that photo id didn't stop them, you'd have to also determine the number of citizens who were unable to vote because of voter identification. To me, the cost of denying a citizen a vote is much greater, and also more certain, than the cost of allowing a noncitizen to vote.

Overall, I'm concerned that the typical "innnocent before proven guilty" logic is thrown out the window when it comes to immigration, citizenship, and voting rights. The government should have to prove to some reasonable level of certainty that I do not have the right to vote, not the converse.

... but later the whole line of inquiry and interview of him was ruled in court to be immaterial to the case. So there's some disagreement with the perspective you're outlining.

So, I'll try to respond as someone who voted in support of Johnson, and can get the appeal of Trump as well as the Clinton, as well as visceral hatred of either.

I get that huge swaths of the electorate feel like this system hasn't been working, and that' it's all manipulated by career political insiders who have their own brand of benevolent authoritarianism. I get the distrust of a liberal culture that overvalues its own contributions to society, and has a false sense of how correct they are and why they are where they are, and overlooks their own serious problems and prejudices. I understand how the media plays into this, and believe that a lot of what Trump has said has been taken too seriously or distorted, that he was projecting a character rather than an argument, and in doing so, demonstrated empathy with a huge group of the population. I get that population has been so screwed by the current system they just want something different, whether that be Sanders or Trump.

However, I strongly believe that there's a false equivalence in these discussions, and that calls for "reasoned debate" on the American right are often intentionally or unintentionally meant as a negotiating tactic, to cover up arrogant intransigence on their part. They don't get what they want, so rather than contributing something constructive, they accuse the left of "not having a reasoned discussion" or not "compromising." When the GOP and Trump talk about the left "not compromising," they're really meaning "we're not getting what we want."

Relatedly, do you really believe that the things that Trump has said about minorities, women, and so forth are acceptable ways of leading the United States, or treating those who disagreed with you? What would the GOP do if the liberal candidate said the same things about Trump?

Which party shut down congress repeatedly rather than have a reasoned discussion? Which party has been obstructing and crippling the supreme court because they didn't get their way?

The reality is that the GOP lost this election in terms of votes, and yet are still entering the white house because of a broken electoral voting system. Like it or not, Clinton won more votes than Trump. So Trump and the GOP are going to undo everything the majority voted for to get their selfish agenda, because they don't care about the majority of the electorate that voted for someone else. Who is being unreasonable in this situation? It's not the liberal party.

I have plenty of reasons to be angry with both parties, but Trump is dangerous in a way that Clinton was not. Sure, I could find some bright sides to his ticket, but it's overshadowed by a lot to be terrified by.

Yeah, all these arguments against non-GMO products, painting non-GMO proponents as antiscientific, seem to me to be strawman arguments that ironically miss the point. It's a thinly veiled means of asserting intellectual superiority that backfires to me because it overlooks the real arguments against GMO products.

Great, you're parents and scientists. I'm a parent and a scientist too. But I understand that many of the arguments against GMOs have nothing to do with science (at least biological science) and everything to do with economics and human rights.

Just because something involves biology doesn't mean that arguments about it can be reduced to that.

A major downside of Stan is its lack of support for discrete priors. This isn't really advertised very well, but is more of a problem than it might sound initially. Its type handling also can get a little frustrating at times. Overall, I highly recommend it but it does have its downsides, and there's some room for alternatives or improvement.

... and/or deregulation (reregulation?) to open up competition. Often if not usually, the same task could be just as skillfully by done, or even more skillfully or appropriately done, by someone with a different educational route, with or without training beyond what is now typical (e.g., NPs, nurse anesthetists, PAs, optometrists, psychologists, pharmacists, RNs, you name it).

PAs provide an instructive example, but there are many others of different sorts. Often, PA schools have stricter prerequisite experience requirements, and PA students often take the bulk of their courses with the MD students, and have maybe a semester less of courses, before clinical training. So the end effect is that a PA's actual experience is often the comparable to an MD's after a couple of years of practice. Hospitals and health care systems know this, and have been gradually replacing MDs in many areas with PAs because they're cheaper but provide similar care.

We can't afford to maintain this fiction that the only way to have something skillfully done is by the MD training model.

As someone in this field somewhat close to the article in a certain sense, I wouldn't say Susan Fiske's attitudes are typical of psychology. Maybe not rare, but not typical either. Her comments have been very controversial to say the least, and many are disturbed by them. Moreover, if you level that statement against psychology, I'm afraid you have to level it against medicine as well, given that there have been similar sentiments expressed in major medical journals as well recently.

Also, without meaning to defend Fiske, her comments here are taken out of context somewhat. Her reference to "methodological terrorism" (from what I have heard through the grapevine) is more, or at least in part, about the trend toward having scientific debates outside of the peer review process, in social media. So my guess is that she might say that part of what she objects to about Statcheck is that it crawls through the papers, labels an error, and then we end up discussing it on HN rather than through peer review. What if Statcheck made an error, which it does sometimes? I don't agree with it, but I think the position I'm describing (which I think is her point in part) isn't unreasonable either. That is, it's not the checking of stats, it's the chaos and disintegration of the peer review system, and "extrascientific" discourse that's happening in science today, if you define "extrascientific" as "outside of peer reviewed journals," where your critics are attacking you on twitter, forums, and facebook, more so than in professional published outlets in a sort of mob.

Again, I do not share her perspective at all (I'm in favor of a shift away from journals) but I do think here her original point was twisted a bit.

Then you have to summarize those replications and decide whether or not the replication studies replicated findings... which means meta-analysis.

This could either be brilliant or a total nightmare:

"Support for arrays with indexing starting at values different from 1. The array types are expected to be defined in packages, but now Julia provides an API for writing generic algorithms for arbitrary indexing schemes (#16260)."

Originally I thought total nightmare but now I'm not sure.

I agree with your general sentiment, but think those error rates hide a lot as well. Human error might be at x% overall, but when you eliminate malfunctioning humans, broadly defined, it's probably much lower than x%.

The recent death of the Tesla owner, for example, as far as I know, was due to the vehicle accelerating into a semi. This is something that most people would not do even in their worst driving state unless they were intoxicated or seriously mentally impaired. I don't want AI driving errors to be compared to human benchmarks that include people who are seriously intoxicated.

A lot of speech frustration problems, similarly, are not only about poor recognition in general, or lack of appropriate prompting to increase classification certainty, but recognition failures in situations where a human would not have any trouble at all, such as in recognizing names of loved ones, or things that would be clear in context to a human. I.e., maybe humans listening to speech corpora would have x% error rate, but that's strangers listening to the corpora. The real question is, if I listen to a recording of my spouse or coworker having a conversation what's the error rate there?

So, although humans are far from perfect, which is something that's often forgotten, the true AI target is also probably not "humans broadly defined" but rather "functional humans" or something like that. AI research often sets the bar misleadingly low because it's so hard to reach as it is.