> daily cancer scans instead of one every few years
Silly nitpick: the reason we don’t do daily cancer scans isn’t the cost, it’s the false positive rate. Invasive procedures like biopsies come with complications like infections that happen at a higher rate and do more damage than the cancer that doesn’t even exist. This dilemma is pervasive in medicine, because our tests aren’t perfect but the thing they’re testing for is rare.
The whole paradigm changes, though, when you can do daily cancer scans. You don't get a biopsy when the scan shows a lump. You get a biopsy after a couple weeks of daily scans showing the lump growing. Plus, having all the data from the daily scans improves your testing accuracy so false positives and negatives are more rare.
The errors are correlated, not random. Lumps are usually benign cysts. If you start cutting people open for every cyst on a scan, you’d kill a lot more people than you’d save.
This isn’t something you can solve with more scans because the tests test for data that is indistinguishable. They look the same on a scan, there’s an overlap in the assay with some random protein with the same binding sites that is only present in 1% of the population, the coding gene in one person gets repeated in a noncoding region in another, and so on. The “more data” that works is a doctor applying professional judgement (which they’re also famously bad at because biology is a fickle mistress).
If you're doing non-redundant tests and your uncertainty bars aren't shrinking, it's usually a skill issue.
If it looks like a duck, it might be a duck - or a painting of one. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck? The joint duck estimation is much more confident now. There might be a few more observational tests one should administer before committing to a duckhood decision, but each tests pins down variables and rejects confounders. Uncertainties are cut down, and we get closer to crossing the threshold between "duck-informative" and "duck-actionable".
Thus, it's often worth it to improve observability. If you managed to make a certain test more reliable, or cheaper to administer, or reduced the chance of adverse effects? Or, in other words, improved SNR, reduced costs, and reduced costs? You can get more information for your buck. Paired with good knowledge: you can make better decisions more easily.
The fact that the thought of "having more information might be bad actually" even occurs in the field of medicine shows just how far it is from being optimal. Having more information isn't always beneficial - some information is genuinely redundant. Some information is not worth the effort of gathering and integrating it. But if you get more information and it results in worse outcomes? You're doing something wrong.
More data (daily scans) can mean we get better at medicine, though, and more accurate. You're assuming "daily cancer scans" look just like they do today, rather than eg unobtrusive devices in our daily lives that measure changes over time.
The frequent "muh false positives" comment we hear from doctors appears to be a lack of imagination?
> Andreessen Horowitz is being played like a fiddle.
Andreessen Horowitz is not being played like a fiddle here. This might be their only investment in a decade that isn’t entirely predicated on being a scam.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
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