Agree with this. Smartphones have enabled profligation of low effort posts and comments, emotional outbursts and mood based content.
This sort of direct or indirect attention grabbing content which is more often than not extremely unhealthy for society gets pushed up by people, because it satisfies our primal dopamine instincts.
As communities get larger and harder to moderate, more and more people assume it is the status quo to create such unhealthy content, and because of smartphones, it is extremely easy to push up such content, and those who werent originally into this also get dragged in.
On an aside, is it really ethical for a company to make insane amounts of profit for being a platform which enables people to bicker, fight and create echo chambers? Agreed that not all social media communities are like this, but even so, is it fair?
>"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur Clarke
I think this would be an interesting place to discuss. When Arthur Clarke made that statement, technology wasnt as ubiquitous as it is today. I've always wondered about the converse of that statement - "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology"
I think the point is, the memory cells do not retain this knowledge for extended periods of time in the case of the current Covid vaccines we have. So should we be looking for a 3rd dose, or try to fund a different vaccine?
Well, that's the question that this study doesn't answer. They (of course) didn't try to infect seniors with reduced antibody response with Covid, they only studied the antibody response in the lab. So the memory cells probably weren't a factor in the lab tests...
When you get infected (or vaccinated), your body produces antibodies as part of its primary response. The antibody tests that are commonly done for COVID look for these already circulating antibodies.
Upon infection or vaccination, your body will also produce antibody-producing memory cells to help respond more quickly if you are infected in the future. If you want to test for these memory cells, you can't use antibody tests. You have to use specialized tests that look specifically for the memory cell responses.
There are some commercially available tests, such as https://www.t-detect.com/, which looks at the T cell response.
A lot of the commercially available antibody tests will fail to detect a prior infection after just a few months. T-Detect now says that its test can pick up infections that occurred 10 months ago. 10 months is probably not the limit of detection; it's just based on the amount of time T-Detect has been available to the public.
Researchers have found memory T cells that respond to the original SARS-CoV virus 17 years post-infection:
Can any tests distinguish between having a response due to prior infection from having a response due to vaccination?
In the months before I was vaccinated I had on two or three occasions something that felt a bit different from the usual cold/flu/allergies that I get, but was not severe enough to justify trying to get a COVID test. I'm curious if I actually have had COVID or not.
It's like saying "All people run out of edible food (antibodies) within hours of being hungry (exposure to distinct protein)". Well, yes, but we have the ingredients to make them in the fridge (memory cells). Just measuring the amount of cooked food (antibodies) will tell you how much I can eat right now, but I'm not going to starve (get sick) in the absence of the cooked food (antibodies) since I have the tools - raw food (memory cells) in case I get hungry (exposed again).
In the case of this study, they tell us we've run out of cooked food in 6 months. That doesn't tell us whether we'll starve, because we could have hella stores in the pantry and they specifically did not measure any of that.
In my country we often joke about how hard it is to find that one "perfect" doctor - knows what he's doing and knows about his strengths and weaknesses, isnt too arrogant or unwilling to accept his own doubts on the diagnosis, experienced enough yet doesn't charge too much and whatever is prescribed seems to work magically for you.
Once you find someone like that, you're set. Not that one has to blindly follow that person, but it lifts a lot of stress off your head.
I think the commenters point was not about people reading articles on the internet and feeling that they've got a better understanding than doctors. It's about medical professionals thinking that they are infallible.
So despite 12 years of elite education, doctors still prescribe Tylenol, even though current science says it basically does nothing except screw with your liver.
Chiropractic is bunk. Audiology is a tool of price gouging hearing aid cartels. Every doctor that played along with the Sackler playbook directly perpetuated the opioid crisis. Optometrists are a front for cartels of glasses and lens manufacturers.
Much of what is qualified as medicine is exploitative corporate fuckery.
Toxic incentives abound, but god forbid we question the integrity of the system.
There's a lot wrong with the institutional role of "doctor" in the US. Part of it is that there aren't enough of them. Part is that the institution is granted a veneer of authority over things it has no claim to (see: psychology.) Part is corporate pharmaceutical corruption and bad incentives.
There are many situations where self directed research is going to be much better than what you'll get from a brief visit with an overworked, irritated, often arrogant and egotistical doctor without intimate knowledge of your unique medical situation. It's infuriating to get those half-assed "best guess" diagnoses or prescriptions.
I would trust an earnest high schooler with Google over a doctor from, say, 1920, with almost any medical situation except actual surgery, and maybe not then. I trust my own understanding of scientific evidence and research over doctors from 1970 or maybe even later.
How much time is needed by modern, educated doctors to exceed the quality of advice gained by self directed, appropriately conducted research, using the best of what the internet has to offer?
Obviously the doctor's advice will exceed what the patient can accomplish on their own, given sufficient time. Absent sufficient time, a person spending 4 weeks researching online could, and probably frequently does, exceed the domain specific knowledge and assessment by a doctor making a 5 minute "best effort. "
It shouldn't be combative, and doctors should be willing to investigate information brought by patients from legitimate resources. The gap between "civilian" and doctors available information and education is not nearly as great as it once was.
Dismissing the situation as "don't believe what you read on the internet" is a shallow and ignorant stance. We have the sum total of human knowledge available to us via Wikipedia, specialist sites, forums, scihub,arxiv, and so on. Everything, including the good stuff, is online.
People can and do use rational, scientific thinking to engage with that information, and in that situation, the doctor's 12 years of education only means something if they can spend an appropriate amount of time acquiring evidence and information from the patient. There's not enough of them, so unless a situation is serious and demands immediate attention, doctors often won't be able to provide sufficient time to make their expertise relevant.
I don't dispute the problems with medicine you listed, although there are also good doctors out there, if you can find them. And sure, if you spend enough time researching something and can filter the facts from the misinformation on the internet then you might be able to do a better job than a doctor that spends less than an hour. But how much of the general population will put in that effort versus trusting the first thing that comes up in a Google search?
Now if you do your own research, and use that to improve your interaction with your doctor that is good. But replacing medical professionals with google searches can potentially be dangerous, at least for some conditions.
Absolutely, the biggest pitfall with self research is not knowing what set of unknowns you have to fill in the blanks for. The value of education is the deep context in which any particular fact will fit, so it takes a lot of effort to fill in a rational approximation of what a doctor can diagnose. 1 hour of a doctor's time could be worth months of effort on your own.
Someone with MS might have their doctor recommend against being vaccinated. Someone else with MS might be fine, but their two stories could lead people to radically different conclusions, when it's the unique particulars that validate the judgment of the doctors in question.
We need a better culture of scientific discourse in public, allowing for nuanced and depth without the pitfalls of fallacious thinking.
Hyperpartisan and sensational media amplify the feedback loop in ragebait meme propagation. Maybe there's a mathematical tool or theory in graphs or networking that could help identify and shut down the spread of argument and combative discourse - not particular ideas, but particular forms. Seemingly opposite facts and opinions can be true in parallel and it's dangerous to attempt to either validate or censor one side or the other.
The latest crusade on misinformation and "anti vax" views is an example of how spectacularly flawed tools of censorship and rightthink can be.
Back in my school days, we used to have lots of poems which would often go on to say that money is the biggest trouble of life, or that money is the biggest corrupter of people's minds, or that money is the root cause of all evil. Most of these poems were written before the 20th century. I would often disagree with these poems, naively thinking that one just had to have some sort of self-control when it comes to money. Now I know I was terribly wrong.
Its really saddening to see the the main objective of people is to own a Lamborghini ,a mansion and live with some hoes, just like that "YouTuber guy".
Maybe that is the downside of the general policy of abstraction that Devs use, that software should be made to look as simple as possible, and all the apparently "unnecessary intricacies"(which could have disastrous effects) should be dumped under the hood.
The point of abstraction isn’t to hide information from you. The point of (properly done) abstraction is to allow you to work without having to worry about the details.
Abstraction has nothing to do with this. The problem is the side effects of social media. Even if Facebook open source their algorithms, I doubt anyone could have conclusively predicted this. We only know all this because of empirical sampling of the user population.
TikTok feeding us what we apparently value is its biggest danger.
When people out of mere curiosity watch something biased/misrepresented/discriminatory/extreme and interact with that content, irrespective of whether all their opinions at that moment of time are the same as that of the content they watched, the algorithm will aggressively push similar content onto you, and there will definitely be a few who fall into "the doom".
I think lots of physicists have a tendency to outrightly reject interpretations which seemingly put humans and other "conscious"(whatever that means) entities on a higher pedestal . It is most probably due to their general dislike of advocation of humans being a superior being than other "animals" by religious organisations, which does inculcate some unhealthy arrogance in people.
But i think physicists need to open up a little more. If QBism or other interpretations where reality is subjective were really true, it would probably lead to some "we got it right initially" by some religious organisations, but honestly, that shouldn't stop physicists from pursuing such theories. I think it can be a win-win scenario in the end.
Except they don't - the science of quantum mechanics with its practical probabilistic "interpretation" has worked pretty well so far. As far as science is concerned, that is.
This sort of direct or indirect attention grabbing content which is more often than not extremely unhealthy for society gets pushed up by people, because it satisfies our primal dopamine instincts.
As communities get larger and harder to moderate, more and more people assume it is the status quo to create such unhealthy content, and because of smartphones, it is extremely easy to push up such content, and those who werent originally into this also get dragged in.
On an aside, is it really ethical for a company to make insane amounts of profit for being a platform which enables people to bicker, fight and create echo chambers? Agreed that not all social media communities are like this, but even so, is it fair?