People deeply understand the physics of tinfoil hats. A properly constructed tinfoil hat needs two layers, with the shiny sides facing in opposite directions. Only the shiny side reflects brain waves. You need to reflect in both directions: one direction keeps the government from using waves to put ideas in your head; the other is to keep the government from reading your mind.
For you mindwarriors out there who like to go on the offence, leave a removable fold over your third eye so you can quickly flip it open and be ready to engage in PSI-combat on the astral plane or realspace as the situation requires.
European arms manufacturing seems quite fragmented, but keen to integrate as a viable alternative to the US. I can imagine Canada being a part of this?
Europe kind of sort of has all the same competences of the US in this area (tanks, APCs, AA missiles, SA missiles, aerospace, radars to name a few) but lacks the scale of production, there's clear scope for collaboration.
Can someone ELI5 why false positives on a MRI are so bad?
From a pure Bayesian PoV, you're better off with a noisy additional observation. At worst it doesn't get much weight.
At a pragmatic level, can't you say, hey here's something thats probably nothing, let's scan it again in 6 months? Why does an MRI necessarily lead to invasive follow ups?
I get that ideally we'd have a crystal ball with 0 type I / type II errors but short of that, why is a noisy predictor bad?
> At a pragmatic level, can't you say, hey here's something thats probably nothing, let's scan it again in 6 months
If a doctor even _hints_ there might be cancer, the patient will have a terrible 6 months (with actual, measurable negative health impacts of the added stress). Also, at some uncertainy-level (say, 10% chance of cancer) the doctor _has_ to say something and has to schedule expensive followups to not risk liability, even though in 90% of the cases it is not only unnecessary, but actively harmful to the patients.
When, on average, the cost of the screening + the harm done by a false positive outweighs the benefits of an early detection, you shouldn't do the screening in the first place.
Because the patient is usually unable to handle such information correctly (the medical system sometimes too). And the whole-body-scan type of tests additionally pre-select for the high anxiety types.
This seems super dumb to me. If the test detects cancer that doesn't need treatment, don't treat it!! It's still better to know it's there and that you need to monitor it.
> Before you know it, you are on the operating table having your prostate removed – and we see examples of that all the time,
Well fix that problem then. If someone puts a smoke detector above a toaster you don't just pull the battery and call it a day.
My parents are doctors so I’m very used to giving them all the data and pushing decision making down to them. Almost all of the time there is no action to be taken. But this built a certain habit that I realized is not conducive to medical care in the US.
I once told my wife that it’s better if she just passes all information downstream and then lets the diagnostician do the diagnostics.
During her pregnancy, at antenatal monitoring, when asked the routine questions I encouraged her to mention everything and so she mentioned a slight twinge in her chest (“it’s probably nothing, maybe something I ate”). She was hooked up to the monitors and so on but this was a sudden moment of panic for everyone but us. The nurse called for a doctor, there was an EKG machine brought up, all sorts of honestly nonsensical reaction given the data.
I realized my mistake soon after. There’s the obvious legal consideration, of course, but the real magic lies in the fact that no one gives full information so if someone sends you a signal they assume it’s crossed some threshold to significance. My mistake was in being a non-normative participant here, akin to someone who drives straight on green in a land where a green light means you first let one person turn left before you go.
Anyway, patients are supposed to perform pre-diagnosis in the US. And you’re not supposed to show your doctor things that they will then act on. You should first apply Bayes yourself and then give the info to the doctor here because they won’t use Bayes.
> Well fix that problem then. If someone puts a smoke detector above a toaster you don't just pull the battery and call it a day.
I think what's happening here is that the smoke detector is indicating the possibility of fire, but the toaster is always being immediately doused in water. Which as we know would cause more damage than good unless there truly was a raging inferno.
The suggestion here seems to be moving the smoke detector to somewhere where there's a higher chance of it ringing means a higher chance of a damaging fire. Which seems quite reasonable.
The question is how can you know if it needs treatment or not. I guess you either need to do a biopsy, or check if it's grown after N months (leaving patient scared and anxious during that time). Neither are great if most cases end up not needing treatment.
If the test provides you zero information about whether it needs treating then it was never a useful test. Presumably it's more like "there's a X% chance this needs treatment". In which case you just set reasonable thresholds for X. E.g. if it's 5% you monitor it, 10% you do a biopsy, 70% you operate, etc.
This is much more sensible than just not testing at all and letting people die from cancer.
> leaving patient scared and anxious during that time
This seems to be the actual motivation. We don't want to scare people with test results so we're just not going to test them. I think that should be up to the patient.
> This is much more sensible than just not testing at all and letting people die from cancer.
This is not what happens. You're assuming that if the cancer does not get detected by the screening then it never gets detected. What actually happens is that the test gives information that might actually be redundant and obtainable in less risky way. What the studies are showing is that waiting until there are other, more specific signs and symptoms of the prostate cancer results in the same survival rates.
See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38926075/. I was not aware of the ERSPC which came out late last year and gives better outcomes for screening, but overall the evidence is not super clear yet. There are possibly certain groups that can benefit from PSA screening more than others. Also, modern, more effective treatments might allow for later diagnosis with the same clinical results.
To be honest, by the time they put him up in a prison in Siberia, subjected to sleep deprivation, cold, exhaustion, beatings, lack of medical care, probably terrible food, and other inmates, I'm not sure why they needed clandestine frog poison. Or maybe with all this he was still clinging on?
There were early reports that he was basically so weakened from such treatment that he went into cardiac arrest after another beating.in the cold, which to my untrained ear sounded completely sufficient. If that wasn't, I'm sure they could find some other inmates and get them to beat Navalny to death, maybe even with some story how they might be crooks but can't stand a traitor. Or something else equally heartwarming.
He was killed because the US and Russia had agreed on an exchange very important
for Putin, but he could not afford to have Navalny part of the exchange.
Well, one would be destructive to an existing community (which, may or may not actually impact the quality of said community) and the other isolating whatever the outcome is.
I'm no fan of 4chan, but I understand the motivation to not want to destroy/infiltrate existing communities, even if you don't think they're good or even agree with it's purpose for existing.
With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour?
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
I'm just one person, but it seems to happen quite consistently that the profiles that appeal to me begin to only be offered behind a rose or some other paywall... rarely if ever in the "free" swipe feed.
Where I struggle with Mikey is that he really pushes the envelope of what a civilian is supposed to do.
- Filming his commutes - fine
- Reporting when people put him in harm's way - more than fine
- Reporting people he sees who don't endanger him personally but are breaking the rules and could create dangerous situations - probably fine, though getting a little iffy for me
- Going out of his way to look into people's cars and look for phone use - pretty iffy
- Deliberately creating confrontation and direct danger, out of other drivers illegal driving - too far for sure (look up "Gandalf corner")
It is sucky that the police don't do more of this enforcement. But as another London cyclist, he crosses the line that makes me feel less safe as a cyclist, due to the elevated level of hate cyclists receive.
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