Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents • Hacker News Board

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#131

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #81

jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

> "[A]lgorithms are made by people and the results ... were reviewed multiple times by people," You got that right. The way they talk about "an algorithm did it" makes it seem as as if they think that somehow explains it, like there was only one algorithm possible handed down from god or something. We'll be seeing more and more of this of course. "We can't be blamed, it was an algorithm! We can't be blamed for trusti…

In general, blaming the algorithm is an indirect way of blaming software engineers. From Facebook to the VW emissions scandal to Stanford’s vaccine allocation, people love narratives that blame engineers. I suspect this trend will only get worse as the general public realizes that engineers are now a highly compensated professional, similar to how lawyers are the butt of so many jokes.

Very few people are reading this as some engineer wrote an opaque piece of software that made this decision. They're reading it, based on what the article says, as we came up with a set of prioritization criteria which were flawed.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#132

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:18 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #63

jrumbut wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an understandable error only if residents and their safety isn't at the front of your mind. Perhaps if a resident had been closely involved they would have been able to tell the developers that they don't have anything in the location field. It's not like Stanford didn't know a limited supply vaccine was coming several months ago, there was time to figure this stuff out. And it would have been, if it had been a…

Not everything can be high priority. Stanford administrators several months ago would have been working on securing adequate supplies and staffing for the expected fall surge; that's a much more important problem, both to the system as a whole and to the residents, than who gets vaccinated today vs. next week.

I've got to be honest with you: this thing can totally be solved with a human pass. In fact, give me the list, your employment rolls, and I'll fix this for you for free in a couple of hours at max.

Government workers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of failure mode: assuming everything is hard. This is not that hard. It's pretty easy. But big company workers are also usually susceptible to this. They don't get things done very fast so they're used to things taking a long time to do and assume that even trivialities must take a couple of days.

But that's why companies like Tesla and SpaceX succeed to these peoples' surprise. They look at these companies and say "They can't do that. This is hard. It takes maybe a half century of engineering."

Turns out lots of things, even if they're hard, can be done pretty fast. But not by those who've been damaged by their own slowness not being punished.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#133

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #34

fairity wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people are misunderstanding the likely root cause. > An algorithm was used to assign its first allotment of the vaccine. The algorithm prioritized health care workers at highest risk for COVID infections, along with factors like age and the location or unit where they work in the hospital. Residents did not have an assigned location, and along with their typically young age, they were dropped low on the…

I don't think I was assuming anything in particular about the intents. it's a rather important thing not to check on actual data, including residents in the sample, isn't it? they just never bothered to test the algorithm, didn't even review the results it spit out, before delivering the results as a plan? (it is quite possible indeed they didn't, I'm not saying that is a coverup for some other motive, I'm saying tha…

"Designed"? They had a meeting and discussed what criteria they should use, someone documented that, and someone else wrote some Excel.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#134

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

It should be no surprise that, when confronted with this error (if it is one, POSIWID, etc. etc.), admin staff insisted on preserving the erroneous state. Should America ever find herself with single-payer healthcare during shortages, she will find herself encountering this same situation once again. She will then react with outrage and surprise, learning not that centralization sets these incentives, but falsely doubling down in the belief that this repeated failure of centralization is evidence that the wrong kind of people were at the centre: not very different from communists who argue that "it just wasn't done right by the right people".

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#135

Post by bisectable » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #97

LeanderK wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a native speaker and I don't think I understand the quote. What should "money laundering for bias mean"?

Money laundering is a crime in which one takes money or goods taken through criminal activities (e.g., theft) and sends it through some process, usually a cover, like a business or something, to make it appear legitimate. More generally, it refers to the process by which money or resources obtained through ethically questionable means is passed through layers of other activities so as to obscure its original source.…

The solution to this conundrum is to aggressively encode explicit biases into the algorithm. The only requirement is that the explicit biases favor certain demographics that are politically deemed more equal than others.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#136

Post by neilv » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #128

neilv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this opinion interesting: https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2015/09/how-call-rooms-reflect-...

Short summary for people who don't want to read it: author says that call rooms were for functionality and that they believe that call room quality and medical learning quality are non-correlated. Author does not discuss absence of call rooms. Only adding that summary because I assumed, given context of GP, that absence of call rooms would have been discussed. If you're like me, hope I've saved you the time.

Sorry, I should've been clear that it was opinion about what call rooms are for (since I could only guess, and, according to the article, they aren't like the lounges I've occasionally seen on TV).

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#137

Post by xwdv » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

LeanderK wrote: post #82

smnrchrds wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Machine learning is like money laundering for bias" https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/744595961217835008

I am not a native speaker and I don't think I understand the quote. What should "money laundering for bias mean"?

Concretely, imagine you have a bank, and you decide you don’t want to give loans to black people.

You employ a machine learning algorithm, feed it some data that shows black people in poverty have high risk of default on loans and avoid giving it data that shows otherwise. Train your neural network hard.

Now when people ask about why you won’t don’t give out many loans to blacks, throw your hands up and say “I would but our advanced machine learning algorithms say these people are high risk, we’re not racist we’re just following the results.”

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#138

Post by js2 » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

afterburner wrote: post #117

js2 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you visit this page with an ad blocker enabled, nothing renders. If you disable your ad blocker on the page, well, god help you: https://ibb.co/PskWz4d A couple alternative links for reading: - https://outline.com/udkxSE - https://pastebin.com/5MQE91k3

Seemed fine with uBlock Origin

I'm using AdGuard on iOS/macOS with an aggressive set of content blockers. Not sure which rule is blanking the entire page, but there's so many ads and other crap on that page I don't care to debug it.

When I load with content blockers disabled, Safari reports 17 (!) trackers prevented.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#139

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #136

renewiltord wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short summary for people who don't want to read it: author says that call rooms were for functionality and that they believe that call room quality and medical learning quality are non-correlated. Author does not discuss absence of call rooms. Only adding that summary because I assumed, given context of GP, that absence of call rooms would have been discussed. If you're like me, hope I've saved you the time.

Sorry, I should've been clear that it was opinion about what call rooms are for (since I could only guess, and, according to the article, they aren't like the lounges I've occasionally seen on TV).

All good. Link appreciated anyway.

I think it would have helped if you had described why you felt the link was worth sharing but I intend that feedback as gently as possible and not as a rebuke of any sort.

Re: Stanford apologizes after vaccine allocation leaves out medical residents

#140

Post by throwaway9870 » Sat, Dec 19, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

doctoring wrote: post #127

throwaway9870 wrote: post #40

I can't really get upset until I understand who got it instead of the resident.

The residents who didn't get it: those working 80+ hrs/week in the emergency room, in the ICU, intubating patients, operating on patients, etc etc etc Some people I know of who got it instead: Radiologists who primarily work from home. Administrative roles with relatively low (or no) patient interaction. Not saying those people shouldn't get vaccinated -- just that if you were asked to come up with a priority list, i…

Thanks for the info, that stinks for sure. I hope they get it right now that they are revisiting the issue. I have a soft spot for that hospital, my first child was born there.