[alexashka]

It may be a bridge to nowhere for the patient but it is a profit opportunity for hospital owners.

You're just another input in their number go up paperclip maximizer - where your road leads beyond their number go up is not a concern for them.

[bruce511]

In one sense your comment is accurate - hospitals exist to "do something". And yes, in the US the hospital us part of a for-profit health system.

But your comment is not limited to hospitals. It's true for every business. If I sell an ice-cream my interest ends after you pay for it. Equally I'm not going to withhold ice-cream from overweight people - my job is to sell ice-cream.

If the hospital was a non-profit, and they felt there was no viable appropriate medical intervention, and they sent the patient home with no action you'd likely complain about that too. (I would, I go to hospital with an expectation that they'll at least try to fix me.)

It's somewhat trite to blame the profit motive, partly because that encompasses all of us, and partly because hospitals and doctors are primed for action, not inaction.

[lucianbr]

> partly because that encompasses all of us, and partly because hospitals and doctors are primed for action, not inaction.

This does not in any way justify pushing a patient into action when action may not be the best course for them.

[trimethylpurine]

I don't think that's what the previous commenter implied.

Especially in this case, that's not what happened.

Patient was facing a very painful, certain, and more immediate death. Or with surgery the patient might live long enough to discover that the tumor is benign and continue with a decent quality of life.

Action objectively offered a chance of survival that a lack of action could not.

I'd argue that even though it wasn't the outcome he hoped for, the author lived long enough to write this piece because the doctor pushed for action.

I think that fairly well removes profit from consideration. The doctor made the best call from every angle given the facts presented, in my opinion.

[alexashka]

> But your comment is not limited to hospitals. It's true for every business

Yes, the problem being wide-spread in no way diminishes it.

You can apply your logic to slavery and realize it works just as well. Look, everyone's buying and selling slaves, it's true for every business - it's somewhat trite to blame slavery, etc, etc.

[pirate787]

Actually a majority of hospitals in the US are not-for-profit.

[AdamN]

The book Outlive by Peter Attia refers to this as Medicine 2.0 (vs 3.0 which is health over an entire life).

In the end though, Medicine 2.0 is very good at discrete issues like a brain tumor. It's a good thing for those afflicted that there are profits to be made there because it means that there are huge facilities and training dedicated to these types of medical issues and their resolution.

[skeeter2020]

Your comment hsitory shows you really seem to like this "paperclip maximizer" analogy; I'm not sure what it means.

[DaiPlusPlus]

The term "paperclip maximizer" is a reference to a thought-experiment explained in this 2014 interview with Nick Bostrom: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxfor...

> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans..

EDIT: While the article is from 2014, Nick Bostrom's thought-experiment dates back to his 2003 thesis: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai (props to @o11c for the correction)

-----

Of course, back in 2014 was before LLMs and visual-image-generators were a thing (StyleGan's paper was 2018), but Roko's Basilisk was described in 2010, which would colour people's thoughts of "AI" back then somewhat differently to today:

2014: "AI" means perfect and unbiased reasoning ability, total objectivity (given one's axioms); it will have the ability to outthink its human operator/sysadmin and somehow "escape" onto the Internet, and make a living for itself trading its services for Bitcoin before going-on to do literally anything it wants, like hack Russian nukes to bomb the US, so a paperclip-making AI really could kill us all.

2024: "AI" means using statistical tricks to generate text which contains frequent factual errors, unsound reasoning, and reflects our cultural-biases back at us. A paperclip-making AI will be the next Juicero before running our of VC funding.

[o11c]

That's not the origin, it was said in 2003 at least: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai

[DaiPlusPlus]

Ah, thanks. That's odd - my Google search results didn't have anything predating 2014. Weird.

I've updated my post with the correction.

[ta988]

Welcome to the enshittified google. It is becoming increasingly useless to find anything that's not recent and popular.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I’m making an effort to switch to Kagi this month; tried it?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Yeah, it's like they're optimizing for very specific metrics that no longer correspond to what users actually want in a way that has negative side effects. Perhaps there's some short phrase that could describe such behavior...;P

[_ea1k]

Maybe they are a bot that has been trained via RL to maximize their paperclip maximizer analogies.

[Zircom]

Universal Paperclips, it's a clicker game where the only object of the game is to make your count of paper clips go as high as possible. With that in mind I'm sure you can reason out his intent now.