271–280 of 460 posts
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I thought about it a lot, It's what I strive for, I'm liking it. It's more like: I'm suggesting you get paid for doing your hobby.
I think what makes a hobby a hobby is the lack of obligation... at least compared to work.
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The reason energy and AI are more attractive than healthcare has little to do with "identity", "culture" or "positionality". It has much more to do with the fact that the field is chock full of incidental complexity that makes doing any kind of good work an extremely unrewarding slog. Look at the 834 EDI format [1], for example. Does anyone want to work with a file format as nasty as this? Does anyone want to work in…
Wait a second... what’s stopping you from changing —this— situation then? Solve the data format problem. Make it easier for everyone to exchange data in meaningful, efficient ways. Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way. M…
I think it would be truly revolutionary if we could change the format, but what I think would be almost a better step is to write open source parsers that can accurately translate X12 into something sane and keep the interchange the same so that everything can be balanced out like a checkbook. Check out the 835 format for this part as it's supposed to be a data stream of transactions. Too bad the dozens of flavors of X12 are locked behind licensing and thousands of dollars of books for the rules :/
Additional reading on this god-awful data format: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19398-01/820-1275/6ncv5s178/inde...
I think there is a problem with trying to target your attention on world changing technology, in that it is very rare for the world to be changed in a big way by direct effort towards change. I think this is related to both the difficulty in identifying what will really provide benefit and also the difficulty in actually achieving anything beyond incremental change to mature technology. Ideas that really make a difference tend to come out of left field and are almost completely unexpected.
If you are looking for something to do that you will look back from your death bed and say "I did that", then you need to select something that you can actually achieve. This will not be the thing that everybody else is working on, because unless you are truely remarkable your effort will be lost in the noise of what everybody else is doing. You need to find something that your both enjoy, and after honest evaluation you have the ability to excel in and take to the next level.
If you were living in the early 1900's I would suggest working on the field effect produced when electricity is passed through centain types of silicon. No one will know your name, but transistors certainly changed the world. How in 2019 do you identify what will have a similar impact? Simply put, you can't. All you can do is pick something interesting and work at it. If you try to solve the big problem you will almost certainly get drowned in the problem, you need to work on something small that can be leveraged to make the big thing.
Sorry I ramble.
History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way.
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The reason energy and AI are more attractive than healthcare has little to do with "identity", "culture" or "positionality". It has much more to do with the fact that the field is chock full of incidental complexity that makes doing any kind of good work an extremely unrewarding slog. Look at the 834 EDI format [1], for example. Does anyone want to work with a file format as nasty as this? Does anyone want to work in…
Wait a second... what’s stopping you from changing —this— situation then? Solve the data format problem. Make it easier for everyone to exchange data in meaningful, efficient ways. Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way. M…
Long answer: It's not like people don't understand that the current situation is suboptimal. It's that any kind of change implemented unilaterally will leave you unable to communicate with your counterparties. The severe consequences of this (not getting paid, being out of compliance with HIPAA) means that any kind of change to health-care IT at a system-wide level requires an absolutely massive amount of politicking and often fails to improve the situation.
The problem is that health care institutions are so interlinked that driving any kind of global change is a process best measured in decades. Combine this with the fact that the culture in health care is very conservative, and people tend to be hostile towards change by default and you have a situation where it's often easier to leave the industry and save your sanity than to remain and continue bashing your head into a brick wall over and over again.
I found a tolerable job with friendly people in a city that I like. My manager at said tolerable job gives me tasks to complete. In exchange, I get paid money which I use to live.
But don't you feel like there are things out there, things you truly enjoy so much that you will do them more than others and you will naturally start to excel at them and someone might even pay you for it? Maybe not now or tomorrow or next year, but there must be parts of your job that are not only tolerable but actually nice... would it hurt you to try to get more if the nice and less of the tolerable, year over ye…
I’ve been alive nearly 40 years and everyday become more confident that the answer is no.
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You suggest making my hobby my work. Think about that for a second.
I thought about it a lot, It's what I strive for, I'm liking it. It's more like: I'm suggesting you get paid for doing your hobby.
My job says I have to implement a CSV parser for a customer’s unique idea of “CSV”, and by the end of the week whether I find it interesting or not.
(Well, not my job, thank $DEITY. But for many.)
I found a tolerable job with friendly people in a city that I like. My manager at said tolerable job gives me tasks to complete. In exchange, I get paid money which I use to live.
But don't you feel like there are things out there, things you truly enjoy so much that you will do them more than others and you will naturally start to excel at them and someone might even pay you for it? Maybe not now or tomorrow or next year, but there must be parts of your job that are not only tolerable but actually nice... would it hurt you to try to get more if the nice and less of the tolerable, year over ye…
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> You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside Great point. What startups that are trying to infiltrate "old/traditional" industries like hospitals or healthcare are realizing. Need to shadow doctors to see their workflow, not just propose a solution based on your observation or reading articles about hospital shortcomings.
Ive also noticed that even though the industry has done things X way for a long time, sometimes those are done because "well We've always done it that way". It's cargo culting, and nobody has a good reason why its done. Being an outside can sometimes mean that you call attention to that, and show better ways. And with the internet and publications, can be an effective way to do that. Most of the times however, there…
There is always a reason why things are done a particular way "It's always been done that way" is shorthand for "I don't know why it's done that way". Like history, you need to understand the reasons behind a process before you can effectively change it, otherwise you are doomed to make the same mistakes and very soon your shiny new process will start to look as cobbled together as the previous one.
First, I am doubtful that we have the capacity to imagine what the world will be like at the end of your life. If you were asking this question in 1907, you wouldn't be able to anticipate the disruptive transformation and opportunity of automobiles. Cory Doctorow always says that good science fiction doesn't predict the future so much as it anticipates the present. That said, there is strong anecdotal evidence that the gadgets you see on today's Star Trek will be real things people aren't impressed by in 50 years. Maybe get working on food replicators. ;)
The second thing about five-year plans is that five years is a perfect amount of time for a chapter of your life where you really focus on something that excites you. I could be learning a skill, building a company, having a child. (Yes, apparently a child takes longer than five years, but the first five are the most involved.) The result is that you will be what others describe as an interesting person with broad, colorful experiences that give you lots to talk about with your friends and life partners. Incidentally, the #1 complaint of unhappily married women is that their husbands are too predictable.
Ultimately, nobody ever gets to the end of their life and things, "man... I wish I had made fewer interesting decisions!"
The likelihood of you being able to decide today what will be the most productive and exciting use of your entire life is extremely small. The key is to make sure that the next five years is as interesting as possible. Rinse and repeat.
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> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in. > Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't wor…
>> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. > At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. I believe the GP is saying you can be in the top 5% of a chosen field, if you try, because other people are pursuing other things. So 100% of the population could be in the top 5% of something.
This is where I find deep meaning in the Cervantes quote, “The road is always better than the inn.” Accepting the outcome of the admixture of own’s controllable action and the infinitely greater uncontrollable action of the world as positive can go a long way to a kind of stoic peace and ultimately happiness with one’s worldly produce.