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Sorry no, it doesn't work like that. In either case. Doctors, like professors, are evaluated by former patients based on a mix of factors. In your doctor exam

Sorry no, it doesn't work like that. In either case. Doctors, like professors, are evaluated by former patients based on a mix of factors. In your doctor example, doctors don't "solve problems". They see patients. Many times these patients present with conflicting and hard-to-resolve symptoms. I imagine with the internet this has gotten worse. They use a mix of Occam's Razor, deductive reasoning, and social psychology for the patient's long-term health. You don't want a doctor that finds the answers to complex problems and gives out morphine. You want a doctor that over decades has patients with the best outcomes. In my example, the one doctor may have ticked you off so much you decide never to go back -- and quit smoking just to prove her wrong. That's a win for both you and the doc, although there's no problem being solved. You can speculate various ways to go at this. Perhaps the doctor is evaluated by other doctors working at that location. Or perhaps it's a matrix of various things. As long as you're just pulling stuff out of the air, you can invent any kind of system you'd like. And tech will deliver it for you. Human interventions are messy affairs, and thank goodness for that. We are not robots. Your proposal might do a great job of sorting out professors who teach students well enough to take the test, but heck if I see where that is the end of the analysis. That's just the beginning. We're just getting started talking about professors who can lead a class to mostly pass a test. That should be a baseline for any professor. This is the problem we see in software development. You can come up with all sorts of metrics to stand in place of evaluating whether a team/person is good or not, but whatever you come up with mostly seem to work -- and has very bad effects on those being measured. (With the possible exception of business-value-loop feedback time) I don't think this is tractable in the way you seem to want it. If I were picking a college or professor, I might look at five or six variables and weigh them in various ways depending on my personal needs and goals at the time -- which might change tomorrow. I might want to go interview them. Meet some current and former students. There is a severe and onerous "platform danger" in tech. It starts with the conceit that we can build platforms for anything. It ends up with people not-as-smart-as-they-used-to-be having Google tell them where to go for dinner. Or Wally in Dilbert coding himself up a minivan. [0] I'm not saying the metric definitions and accumulations aren't interesting. They deserve to be considered. I'm saying that by reducing human judgment to single vector, it makes us as a species dumber. That's one of those intuitive things that sound good but are in reality quite bad. 0. https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

pas 8y ago
Over decades, yes, but that is moving the goalpost. The vast majority of healtcare problems are dependent on using the right known technique (medication, surgery, etc.) and of course the problem is finding that, so diagnosis. Handing out morphine is not a solution in the genral case. Long-term health is sadly largely independent of acute healthcare providers' work. It depends on genetics, environmental factors, behavior (exercise, diet, lifestyle) and a stochastic factor of acute problem solving (as the body breaks down more and more depends on doctors, and the fast and correct identification and application of the best healthcare technique). So healthcare has two categories, the first is the common flu, I have some gastro issues, refer to specialist, manage chronic illnesses (diabetes, pain, low/high blood pressure) and the other is usually the problem for specialists, when they have no or wrong idea what's going on and thus an acute problem becomes a year(s) long trail of tears. Now, that said, I'm not advocating for ignoring the edge cases and just use this one simple magic formula to decide who can play doctor. But we are still stuck in the dark, because we focus on the complexity, the long term, the human component, the expertise, yet fail to do the most basic thing to get at least somewhat reliable data. And I'm aware of the problem of fishing for signals in data, but without it we can't even start the trial and error process, we can't differentiate between the two cases, and on average let's say we end up doing nothing. Furthermore, we know that the obvious solution is to refactor the system. But that rarely presents a real possibility for education and human long term health. (You know, the small stuff :)) It'd be easy to ban smoking and alcohol and give less damaging stuff for people instead and spend more to treat addicts, and introduce negative income tax as a form of basic income to help poverty to reduce stress and help mental health to reduce number of smokers. Similarly it'd be easy to reform schools, and do all of the above to help parents to have more time for their kids so they get a better nurturing youth overall, which makes them ambitious and motivated to learn, study, explore and understand. And it'd be easy to do all this, but that's not likely. Hence the proposal for simple but maybe vastly effective changes.

pas 8y ago

Over decades, yes, but that is moving the goalpost. The vast majority of healtcare problems are dependent on using the right known technique (medication, surgery, etc.) and of course the problem is finding that, so diagnosis. Handing out morphine is not a solution in the genral case. Long-term health is sadly largely independent of acute healthcare providers' work. It depends on genetics, environmental factors, behavior (exercise, diet, lifestyle) and a stochastic factor of acute problem solving (as the body breaks down more and more depends on doctors, and the fast and correct identification and application of the best healthcare technique). So healthcare has two categories, the first is the common flu, I have some gastro issues, refer to specialist, manage chronic illnesses (diabetes, pain, low/high blood pressure) and the other is usually the problem for specialists, when they have no or wrong idea what's going on and thus an acute problem becomes a year(s) long trail of tears. Now, that said, I'm not advocating for ignoring the edge cases and just use this one simple magic formula to decide who can play doctor. But we are still stuck in the dark, because we focus on the complexity, the long term, the human component, the expertise, yet fail to do the most basic thing to get at least somewhat reliable data. And I'm aware of the problem of fishing for signals in data, but without it we can't even start the trial and error process, we can't differentiate between the two cases, and on average let's say we end up doing nothing. Furthermore, we know that the obvious solution is to refactor the system. But that rarely presents a real possibility for education and human long term health. (You know, the small stuff :)) It'd be easy to ban smoking and alcohol and give less damaging stuff for people instead and spend more to treat addicts, and introduce negative income tax as a form of basic income to help poverty to reduce stress and help mental health to reduce number of smokers. Similarly it'd be easy to reform schools, and do all of the above to help parents to have more time for their kids so they get a better nurturing youth overall, which makes them ambitious and motivated to learn, study, explore and understand. And it'd be easy to do all this, but that's not likely. Hence the proposal for simple but maybe vastly effective changes.