1. operates against a well-defined DB of medical studies

2. intakes my basic demographics, vital signs and medical history

3. quantify uncertainty wrt a specific diagnostic (it's own or one received by a healthcare professional)

4. specify medical tests that can be executed, and how they can be obtained

5. provide scripts for interacting with healthcare professionals/functionaries

I would imagine that the thing would need distinct operating modes:

1. A diagnosis generator

2. A diagnosis evaluator/critiquer

3. A patient educator

Hence, I'm beginning to believe that unless you're doing very specialized work - the model itself has become a commodity, incremental quality is irrelevant and that economics and privacy are what actually matter now.

So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.

I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:

1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers

1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.

All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.

The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.

I remember talking to someone who worked on quantum computing explain how interesting the domain was, and at the very end he concluded with "if the Chinese figure this out before we do, then it's all over".

Also relevant here is that the concept of "religion" itself was introduced very recently in the 16th and 17th centuries, and seems to have been created so that specific groups of people could consider their own activities as being non-religious. See Before Religion by Nongbri.

That being said, the way anti-religion ppl talk about "control" is so profoundly sloppy and underdefined that it's entirely meaningless. If I try to stop someone from shooting me, am I trying to control them? If I change the the youtube algorithm, did I control them? If I spread a bunch of malaria-resistent mosquitos around, did I control them?

Christianity is evangelical because it believes what it's doing is good and should be shared. If you can only conceptualize this as "control", then I feel sorry that you've internalized the worst and most misery-inducing parts of the last 100 years of western philosophy.

This evangelical quality is a feature of many world religions, including the ones that don't normally get called religion, like the New Atheism movement.

thank God the world has moved past this kind of 2010s New Atheism.

"look at @design-document and generate a TLA+ specification for the interactions between local and remote"