kendallpark
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
The reaction of astronauts to seeing Earth from space -- the mystery of creation. Parents seeing pieces of themselves echoed in their children who are nonetheless distinct and surprising -- the mystery of the person.
Much of the meditations in the encyclical are related to human dignity and fraternity. An example:
> Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.
Even from a purely consequentialist point of view: if behavior around the cadavers gets out to the public, and the public deems it disrespectful, the public stops donating cadavers, which negatively impacts medical education. Even if you don't personally believe in treating human remains with respect, a huge part of society does, and you have to at least respect that.
I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.
I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.
Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:
- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery
- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.
- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.
- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."
For the longest time I found walking even short distances insufferably slow and boring. I ride my bike--a lot. The distances and durations I cover have grown each year to the point that centuries (metric or imperial) are a regular weekend event. Boredom is always an issue when you're out for 5+ hours, but you'd be surprised at how much your sense of time can change if you normalize riding long distances. Interestingly, my mind's time-condensation for cycling never translated to walking.
This year I branched out into winter ultra fat biking, which, as it turns out, can involve a significant amount of walking. In bad snow conditions one can end up pushing a heavy bike for hours at a time. The two races I did this winter had their respective all time worst course conditions. So, I did a lot of walking.
This spring I've found myself opting walk to the gym and office, leaving the bike at home. My mind doesn't count the minutes the way it used to. I actually have no sense of how long it takes me to get to these places. I suspect the exaggerated stimulus of pushing a bike for hours through snow drifts has adapted my perception of everyday walking. I would hypothesize that the author's 20-mile weekend walks makes their long daily walks more doable. If you want to enjoy short regular walks, perhaps it would help to go out for a very long and hard walk from time to time.
My stack trace of investigation:
- The model is good, we just need to get the doctors to trust the model.
- The model is good, we need to figure out how to build an informed trust in the model (so as to avoid automation bias).
- The model is good, we need informed trust, but we can't tackle the trust issue without first figuring out a realistic deployment scenario.
- The model is good, we need informed trust, we need a realistic deployment scenario, but there are some infrastructural issues that make deployment incredibly difficult.
After painstaking work with real-life EHR system, sanity-check model inference against realistic deployment scenario.
- Holy crap, the model is bad and not at all suitable for deployment. 0.95 AUC, subject of a previous publication, and fails on really obvious cases.
My summary so far of "why?": assumptions going into model training are wildly out of sync with the assumptions of deployment. It's "Hidden Tech Debt in ML" [1] on steroids.
[1] https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/86df7dcfd896fcaf2674f...
> I'm not a philosopher or theologian, but this just seems wrong to me
Agreed, it's an ahistorical take. The Western secular concept of "human dignity" has roots in the Abrahamic religions. Not the other way around.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-1590-9_...