samirunni
Joined 14 years ago
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369
Submissions
123
Member since
Jun 18
https://twitter.com/samirunni
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Comment · 2 years ago
“Standardizing an interface between health care providers and insurance companies would be a huge win. No matter how badly designed, it would be better than the current mess, and save several percent of US GDP.”
A new regulation was actually proposed by the federal government a year ago to do that: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/burden-reduct...
There’s also a new program to reduce fragmentation for dementia care in particular: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/...
Solving the sorts of problems highlighted in the article (from 2017) is well-recognized, by elected officials in 2023, as a priority of their constituents.
However, neither of the initiatives linked above will systematically address the underlying issues, which are:
1. Conflicting and overlapping objectives between federal, state and local governments, as well as between the different branches of government.
2. Partially privatized administration of government programs, such as Medicare. This inevitably results in further conflicts of objectives, and incentivizes gaming the system.
3. The only real way for the government to learn from failure, and adapt to it, is by creating a mountain of new regulations, which just makes everything more expensive / take longer.
4. Extreme caution, in regulated industries, around sharing information with external parties, due to liability concerns. This drives further consolidation.
Comment · 10 years ago
> marrying CROs to investigators and vice versa would be super helpful.
Can you explain this idea in more detail? Many CROs are already establishing preferred-provider relationships with investigators.
Comment · 10 years ago
> I can just go ahead do it.
Doing experiments on animals (and especially humans or other vertebrates) is the exact opposite of something you can just go ahead and do. The best way to see that is to give it a go yourself.
> At the very least, we could just reverse engineer biology.
Many people in the past with a CS/physics mindset have made similar claims. If you try to work with living systems, I'm sure you'll see why these problems aren't just a matter of spending R&D dollars.
Comment · 10 years ago
> All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges.
If they are so "easily approachable," feel free to solve them any time. I think you'll find that solving problems in living systems (let alone in the clinic) is much more challenging than it might appear from a CS/physics perspective (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1).
I'm not saying it's not worth trying (it's certainly a more worthwhile endeavor than getting people to click on more ads), but that it's important to be realistic (for example, that all disease is unlikely to be cured by 2100).
Comment · 10 years ago
See chapter 3 ("Nanotechnology will not lead to super-abundance") of Against Transhumanism for a good argument for why this isn't so simple: http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201...
Summary
1. Lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness of molecules (Van der Waals force), constant random interactions (Brownian motion) at the microscale of cells means mechanistic intuitions from the macroscale don't apply.
2. High surface area (combined with VdW force) causes problems related to friction and energy dissipation.
Comment · 10 years ago
> online journals with comments sections so the community can discuss any potential flaws
Check out PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/
Comment · 10 years ago
> Most of the methods in a biological wet lab are very far from standardized and need a great deal of troubleshooting. Most post-docs in a new lab spend a couple months just trying to get basic stuff working that they've done dozens of times before.
Having had experience with syn bio in grad school and trying to reconcile the empirical (biology) and first principles (CS/math) approaches, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to streamline the troubleshooting process for picking up and optimizing wet lab methods. I'd love to chat - my email's in my profile.
Comment · 10 years ago
Here are high resolution images of the bookshelves: http://imgur.com/a/eoDng