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Mathematics meets real life

gowers.wordpress.com

21–25 of 25 posts

Re: Mathematics meets real life

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally spent time in the cath lab with one of the doctors mentioned on that site doing ablation therapy. By absolutely zero means whatsoever is it a cure all. More typically, it is a palliative modality.

Are you saying it will never potentially be a cure? Maybe it isn't now, but with enough automated testing on mice or pigs etc. it will get to a mature point. This can also be parallelized, so maybe it can be done in a few months.

> Are you saying it will never potentially be a cure?

Well, I'm saying that the alt-med scammers can come up with 500 new 'potential cures' in the time it takes the real medical world to test one.

And that testing requires so many resources, especially in terms of the time of skilled people who should be doing something more likely to be productive, that it will likely never be done.

This reasoning applies more to stuff that's obvious nonsense, like everything that has suppurated out of the festering wound that is homeopathy, but everything goes through a period where the default reaction is skepticism. That's called science. That's what works.

Re: Mathematics meets real life

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it will never potentially be a cure? Maybe it isn't now, but with enough automated testing on mice or pigs etc. it will get to a mature point. This can also be parallelized, so maybe it can be done in a few months.

> Are you saying it will never potentially be a cure? Well, I'm saying that the alt-med scammers can come up with 500 new 'potential cures' in the time it takes the real medical world to test one . And that testing requires so many resources, especially in terms of the time of skilled people who should be doing something more likely to be productive, that it will likely never be done. This reasoning applies more to s…

Yeah, but this isn't fix-it-in-mexico scam. This is potential med-tech that just needs big-money-mafia to make it rain.

Re: Mathematics meets real life

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're attempting to remedy that by generically promoting it as a cure all, even claiming it's capable of providing immortality? I don't really think you are making an attempt to understand what I, or anybody else here, is saying. You're defending yourself as if we are just blind naysayers, but in fact those people didn't even bother commenting. I swear I'd seen some insightful comments from you before, so I figur…

Why such drastic measures like giving up. As I said in another comment, too low a claim and people think it's not worthwhile, too high and it's crackpotty. How do I get to the right balance? Furthermore, I think the medical industry is full of unsystematic people. Every time you see a medical lab, it's a guy walking around physically moving petri dishes. That's why I'm trying to promote in the tech circles, they do o…

So, just to reiterate - you're claiming to have a key to immortality, something that has been sought after for time immemorial, yet it is up to others to come up with evidence to refute your claim...

Re: Mathematics meets real life

#24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying it will never potentially be a cure? Well, I'm saying that the alt-med scammers can come up with 500 new 'potential cures' in the time it takes the real medical world to test one . And that testing requires so many resources, especially in terms of the time of skilled people who should be doing something more likely to be productive, that it will likely never be done. This reasoning applies more to s…

Yeah, but this isn't fix-it-in-mexico scam. This is potential med-tech that just needs big-money-mafia to make it rain.

> This is potential med-tech that just needs big-money-mafia to make it rain.

The sad fact is, a lot of potential therapies that are a lot more promising than this is will turn out to be dead ends. Unless there's a good reason to think this specific proposed therapy has at least as much chance of panning out as all the other proposed therapies the various labs have already come up with, there's no reason to spend a lot of resources on it.

Re: Mathematics meets real life

#25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write with sufficiently strong terms that you sound like you're blindly evangelising rather than rationally advocating, the average HN reader is going to go "eep" and adjust their prior expectation of your being right -way- down. This effect is, I'm afraid, largely independent of whether you're -actually- right or not - so assuming your goals include "maximise the number of readers of your comment who go on to…

I think you're making that mistake a lot of people in medicine make and what separates them from the tech industry. They're huge pessimists because they don't grok things like physics or computing and are trained/selected for their ability to pass tests out of a textbook. If you put your geekdom "crawl entire web/robot car/computers on every desk" hat on you'll realize you can run circles around the current medical i…

> If you put your geekdom "crawl entire web/robot car/computers on every desk" hat on you'll realize you can run circles around the current medical industry.

Then why hasn't anyone done precisely this?

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