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by dang
857 days ago
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Would you please make your substantive points less aggressively? I appreciate that you know a great deal about this topic and we all probably have a lot to learn from you. Nonetheless you crossed the line here, and not only here—repeatedly mocking someone for their username, for example, is a cheap shot. You undermine your own arguments when you do things like this, in addition to poisoning the culture that we're trying so hard to prevent from becoming outright toxic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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This life and death situation demands a certain decorum. Among others, to rise above the "hi I am coolwulf" stage of interpersonal interactions.
Let me go to a different topic in the same ballpark: imagine you had to build your SARS-CoV-2 response plan based on either a panel of women and men whose name and credentials you are privy to, or a single individual with a blog calling themselves "y0m0mm4" - which one would you, reasonably, choose to consider? Yes, the single individual may have, by chance or skill, happened upon the perfect plan. And, yes, the panel of experts may be completely wrong. But in medicine we call this a Zebra, a very rare event that, in a discipline of probabilistic empiricism, should not initially be considered.
I don't doubt, that all the above might come together to greatly improve treatment decisions. In fact, I know it, because as I said repeatedly, Bruker, Siemens, Tally, and others work on those solutions as well, and they are being used. Initially only in secondary verification, but with three FDA approvals expected this quarter, there might be much more coming.
I just don't think a pseudonymous account on Hacker News is the place to farm something that, not unlike many other medical interventions, has a massive potential of harm. As a somewhat related side note: the US was spared the horrors of thalidomide, because a single woman at the FDA (Frances Oldham Kelsey) refused to certify a medication that did not list the names of the inventors. When she did not get answers to her questions, largely because Grünenthal refused to let her speak to the drug's developers, she refused certification. In medicine names mean something, and if it's just the ability to verify background claims.