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Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

seangeiger.substack.com

161–163 of 163 posts

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#161
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sounds like it should be true but isn’t. It absolutely is true, I've seen it myself. > Were oncologists killing people in 2010 because they lacked the research from the last 15 years? A career is only 25-35 years long. 100% absolutely they were. Maybe you don't understand just how fast cancer treatments change? Cancers that had 20% 5 years survival rates 15 years ago, now have 60% survival rates. Thus if a doc…

> It absolutely is true, I've seen it myself. Seen what? How frequently the average oncologist studies? How many treatments went poorly because of outdated knowledge? I don't think you have. > 100% absolutely they were. So does this mean we are currently killing people out of ignorance and we should wait for the real research? Or we finally figured it out this time? I'm not claiming nobody is making progress. I'm cla…

> I'm not claiming nobody is making progress. I'm claiming that most working Doctor's don't read it.

I love HN hubris. What do you base your claims on?

I assure you that most oncologists stay on top of the latest studies. I work with them on a daily basis.

> Doctors are making mistakes with imperfect and bad knowledge all the time.

That’s not relevant to the current discussion. Mistakes are not the same as not being aware of the latest research.

> In every other country a medical doctor is a 4 year bachelor's degree.

You’re all over the place in your arguments. The length of training is irrelevant to staying on top of the latest research.

> Every professional class has such requirements - accountants, lawyers, civil engineers, etc.

Not to the same degree. I don't recall too many accountants doing 3-4 years of apprenticeship. The world isn’t black and white, there is gray.

I’d suggest to stick to commenting on things you know about.

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSON has never been better than XML. People are just terrible at XML and don't want to learn.

You could say the same thing about assembly language.

No you couldn't. Totally different domain.

Re: Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?

#163
post #91

The real question is: why is everything stuck in PDFs, and the more important meta-question is: why don't PDFs support meta-data (they do, somewhat). So much of what we do is essentially machine-to-machine, but trapped in a format designed entirely for human-to-human (also lump in a bit of machine-to-human). Adobe has had literally a third of a century to recognize this need and address it. I don't think they're payi…

PDFs are essentially compressed Postscript, which is Turing complete, so a PDF in theory can do anything you want.

The big distinction between PostScript and PDF was the removal of the language operators[1]. Adobe Distiller unrolled the PostScript language to create a file without the code.

[1] A small part remained for defining calculations as well as support for PostScript fonts.

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