Was just thinking about this the other day. I feel vindicated that I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Nobody cares
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: Nobody cares
#802Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for de…
One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
Re: Nobody cares
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care. And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn…
in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0]. In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and med…
"In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated."
I'd [citation needed] on that, depending on the condition.
In that for some conditions, successful diagnosis and treatment across a wide range of the population (not just the most educated, articulate, mentally with-it and compliant quartile) is going to depend on being able to get qualitative information from the patient, and interpret that correctly.
Equally though the medical profession has enough specialisation in terms of role to be able to put the right personality types in the right jobs.
Re: Nobody cares
#804One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and…
I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.
Re: Nobody cares
#805My gut says that it isn't a lack of caring, or anything nefarious.
I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.
Re: Nobody cares
#806I had the great displeasure of working with a colleague who thought he was the only one who cared. He told me flat-out that "its OK to care!" during a disagreement.
I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.
Re: Nobody cares
#807Many things that suck, like DMV, do so not because nobody cares, but because incentives are aligned in a way to make things work the way they do.
Re: Nobody cares
#808As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we f…
Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to m…
It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.
"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.
(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)
Re: Nobody cares
#809Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for de…
Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hosti…
Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.
Re: Nobody cares
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing. You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.
If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.
(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)