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by beaconstudios 1626 days ago
A knee doctor will be aware of what knees do and how they support your musculoskeletal system. The problem is institutional: if you go in with a knee injury, you'll be triaged and sent to the knee clinic for scans and assessment for a break, sprain, etc. If that problem is found, it will be treated. But it may be that your knee pain was actually caused by bad posture (it's pretty shocking the number and variety of injuries you can sustain from bad posture) and neither triage nor the knee clinic are assessing your posture. They probably could send you to somebody to do so, but the institutional will is not there because that's not how the medical system is designed.

A whole systems health model would involve essentially a debugging process for injuries and maladies in order to find root causes and treat them. It would require a totally different (transdisciplinary) approach to health though, and institutions don't really change.
1 comments
Schroedingersat 1626 days ago
There really are no adults in charge of anything anywhere, are there?
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beaconstudios 1626 days ago
as the saying goes, the lunatics are running the asylum.

In reality it's all systemic pressures everywhere and nobody, not even institutional administrators, likely have much in the way of free choice over anything that matters.

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Schroedingersat 1626 days ago
The rationalist celebrities could look more at dynamical systems, but then they'd have to admit that systematic effects exist and that daddy Thiel et al are using them to f* everyone over forever in order to pad their already bloated wallets.
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beaconstudios 1626 days ago
True, being a libertarian does disincentivise looking at systems and systemic effects because the biggest system we live in is capitalism and the systemic analyses that have already been done on it don't paint the prettiest picture.
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Schroedingersat 1626 days ago
Moloch will eat us all.
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beaconstudios 1626 days ago
indeed he will, unless we learn how to manipulate him. This is why I'm confused as to why rationalists seem to have done basically no research into complexity theory (systems/cybernetics). Scott Alexander's done the Moloch pieces, and this one article on dynamical systems [1] but aside from that the closest they get is machine learning, which is a descendant.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatri...

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