(Most) vaccines work by letting your immune system know to watch out for particular things. That's an information advantage. Likewise, antibiotics are chemical agents that the body lacks the genes to synthesise. Betting that the immune system's parameters are generally well-calibrated is entirely compatible with taking antibiotics and vaccines, where indicated.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
The immune system does expend resources on vaccines: it makes antibodies, usually has some kind of inflammatory response…. But if a vaccine causes a nutritional deficiency, there's something seriously wrong with your diet.
"Counterfactual number of lives saved" is not the normal sense of the phrase "save a life". By that logic, each person's life can only be saved once, which is not how people normally use the phrase.
Your definition may be useful for cold hard utilitarian calculus, of the sort that hospital directors need to do if they've run out of fundraising opportunities. However, "effective altruism" – which I suspect you're alluding to here – isn't actually an efficient way to save lives, the way it's usually practised (ignoring second-order effects, and everything that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet).
You're right; I should've been more precise. However, we have tools for dealing with this—that's what quality-adjusted life-years are for! I don't contest that surgeries often significantly increase QALYs, and may do so pretty cost-effectively.
Yes they are surprisingly cost-effective in the countries Watsi operates in, which isn't intuitive for those of us who live in places where surgeries are very expensive.
"A review across 23 LMICs found that low-complexity surgeries (e.g., appendectomy, hernia repair) cost only about ~$17 per DALY, whereas even complex procedures were often cost-effective" (Most surgeries on Watsi are low-complexity)
"Reports from the WHO and Lancet Commission consistently emphasize that investing in surgical capacity has high value, in many cases, more than essential drugs or vaccines on a per-DALY basis"
This doesn't handle rock-paper-scissors-type strategy matchups, but at that level of detail, 1000 to 1200 is not the same as (a different) 1000 to 1200.
You, presumably, have examples of these cases. Could you show them to us, please? (Given your understanding of the evidence available to us "ignorant, low-information HN users", you know you're making a bold claim, which creates a corresponding burden of proof.)
TFA provides examples where private equity has been destructive in the healthcare sector:
> A 2024 Review of Financial Studies paper <https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474> found that private equity acquisition of nursing homes was associated with an ~10% increase in deaths, implying approximately 22,500 additional deaths over the twelve-year sample period.
I was asking for examples where private equity has made things better.
That you did is valuable criticism of my writing. When you get deep enough into "no, you're wrong", "no, you're wrong", it becomes virtually impossible to keep track of who's saying what, unless people actually state their claims explicitly… which I didn't.
The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.
>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure.
"A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
What's exhausting is getting through a ten-paragraph article and realising there was only two paragraphs of actual content, then having to wade back through it to figure out which parts came from the prompt, and which parts were entirely made up by the automated sawdust injector.
That's not an AI problem, it's a a general blog post problem. Humans inject their own sawdust all the time. AI, however, can write concisely if you just tell it to. Perhaps you should call this stuff "slop" without the AI and then it doesn't matter who/what wrote it because it's still slop regardless.
I completely agree with your parent that it's tedious seeing this "fake and gay" problem everywhere and wonder what an unwinnable struggle it must be for the people who feel they have to work out if everything they read was AI written or not.
It used to require some real elbow grease to write blogspam, now it's much easier.
I hardly ever go through a post fisking it for AI tells, they leap out at me now whether I want them to or not. As the density of them increases my odds of closing the tab approach one.
It's not a pleasant time to read Show HNs but it just seems to be what's happening now.
It never used to be a general blog post problem. It was a problem with the kinds of blogs I'd never read to begin with, but "look, I made a thing!" was generally worth reading. Now, I can't even rely on "look, I made a thing!" blog posts to accurately describe the author's understanding of the thing they made.
I see your point. You need to recalibrate how to decide what to read since the proxy has changed its meaning. I found a similar issue when monetized Youtubers started making things. It used to be amazing to see some hobby project that was a little bit sophisticated but now big stars have lots of money and their full-time job is doing incredible projects just to make videos of them. It's not AI but it's something that didn't used to exist. I'm thinking channels like "Stuff Made Here" and "I Did A Thing" that sound humble but doing difficult, expensive projects that have no purpose except to look good on a video.
Yeah, I discovered that after I wrote the comment. Very glad to see that Ruffle + WASM has allowed the site to be resurrected nearly identical to how it used to look, so I can show my kids the same goofy stuff that was such a hit with my own group of friends in college.
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