Moldbug, 2012: cancer research fails because they don't work like *software engineers*. "You might or might not be familiar with the term 'OODA loop,' originally developed by fighter pilots ..."
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819346)
posted on August 02, 2020 10:31 PM by
u/dgerard
Pure, rhetorical garbage. Every person is unique; therefore every statistical analysis of people is an abuse of statistics.
God I wish I was able to talk out of my ass that confidently.
What would a tight OODA loop look like? Imagine I’m Steve Jobs, with infinite money, and I have cancer. Everyone’s cancer is its own disease (if not several), so the researchers are fighting one disease (or several), instead of an infinite family of diseases. They are not trying to cure pancreatic cancer - they are trying to cure Steveoma.
Second, they operate with no rules. They can find an exploit in Steve’s cancer genome on Wednesday, design a molecule to hack it on Thursday, synthesize it on Friday and start titrating it into the patient on Saturday. Pharmacokinetics? Just keep doubling the dose until the patient feels side effects. Hey, it worked for Alexander Shulgin.
Moreover, Steve isn’t on just one drug. He’s got thirty or forty teams attacking every vulnerability, theoretical or practical, that may exist in his cancer cells. Why shouldn’t he be attacking his cancer in 30 ways at the same time? He’s a billionaire, after all.
“Modern medicine is great - postmodern medicine sucks” lmaoooo
Imagine if moldbug had not posted this in 2012, we would have never solved cancer in 2013, what a world that would be.
E:
DarkFuturologyhad a post about this 6 years ago. E: removed link, apparently the main mod of that sub is a transphobic anti-vaccine weirdo so fuckem. Also a gamer, so double fuckem, the sub also has literal holocaust didnt happen neonazis so triple fuckem.Trying to fix cancer via Air Force PowerPoint presentation
LOL does he have any idea how drugs are developed??
However, I do endorse using billionaires and their money as test subjects for new drugs. Just double the dose!!
I’m just gonna go over to /r/aviation and look at cool pics and clips of planes instead of trying to parse this (yeah I’m a plane nerd but I look good without a shirt on so fuck you too)
Just look the fuck at that: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/i2dhyb/tupolev_tu160_full_afterburner_not_my_video/
That’s when you’re supposed to use statistics. Statistics is about finding centralized tendencies in data — the ways that things are alike and allowing you to find useful information.
Every at-bat in a baseball game is different. Different weather, different pitches, different strike zone (because strike zones are enforced by umpires) different numbers of people on base. So you can’t figure anything out right? Except that you can. You can say that a pitch down the middle will be hit 90% of the time, you can say that fastballs are hit more often than curveballs, you can say a given player hits better or worse with people on base.
Using the OODA method, is not useful because I don’t have any way to choose a pitch that a player is less likely to hit. I mean, this at bat is different than the last one. It is, but knowing that Bader is less likely to hit a slider than a fastball helps me know what kinds of pitches to throw. OODA would give me nothing but ‘throw whatever, we can’t use the last at bats to make a prediction.’
as a Computational biologist literally working on cancer genomics, glad to inform y’all that since 2012, when we started letting Software Engineers work on biological problems, we have now successfully solved cancer. Y’all are welcome
Here is a somewhat real version of this idea, by people who actually know something about cancer and research.
Tired: run stuff like a company.
Wired: run stuff like the military.
(Yes some companies are now doing that and it isnt going well for any of the workers … i randomly recalled some military ceo abusing some state function to terrorize his employees for better profits).
God these guys always think biology must be secretly so easy and it’s just that all us biologists are such dummies that we ever have issues.
Did he get banned from HackerNews in 2012?
That’s all the post history I can see
Sometimes when I fix software bugs I do feel like I’m looking at code which was created via a billion years of random code generation followed by “looks like it works, push it”, so the human cancer and software development at least have that in common.
Knowing software engineers, thank god this is not how medicine works…