7 ms·

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor fr

The author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contributed that this is an issue in defining average wind directions, as well. The basic problem is that if you record times on a 0-24 hour scale, or wind directions on a 0-360 degree scale, and then naively average the numbers, you get meaningless results (for example, 180 degrees if the wind steadily rotates through every point of the compass). A quick glance at our doctor friend showed she had checked out of the conversation entirely. Possibly she just felt slighted that we were not bowing down in awe at the terrible hours she keeps. But my main impression was that she lives in a world where one receives a piece of information, notes it, and stores it away. And when repeating that received information, one's listeners duly note and store it away. Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable.

nostrademons 16y ago
Unless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
- kes 16y ago
  Now you will know: http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
carbocation 16y ago
The charitable interpretation (for your OB friend) is that she was not speaking literally, and got bored when you started perseverating on her hyperbole. The more likely explanation is that your analysis is indeed correct.
- mbreese 16y ago
  I'd say the more likely case is that she wasn't speaking literally. Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means. Couple that with the fact that most doctors know just enough statistics to get by, and "the most common time for a baby to be born is 3am" gets translated to "the average baby is born at 3am". The bored look was probably just her rolling her eyes.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    "Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means." I talk to doctors quite often lately, with a daughter on the way and all, and the first few times I felt a bit miffed at what I took for her talking down to us. When it got to an absurd level with some nurses (who explained things like how to add several numbers by lining them up, putting a line underneath with a plus sign next to it, and then using a calculator to find the result (true story)), I thought about it some more and it must be because they need to target the lowest common denominator. Which I guess is someone with an iq of 85 or so, as people lower would get special counseling I think. I've tried to find effective methods to communicate to people that they can skip some of the 'duh' parts, but that's not easy. Just saying 'listen I'm no dumb' or even worse, 'hi I'm <name> and I'm a <name profession that requires university degree>' makes you look arrogant and will antagonize people, and they might not dumb it down on purpose anyway, so they might not have a way of not dumbing it down, either. Usually after a few talks people pick up the vibe on how fast you understand things and what you already know, but when you have many different contacts with various people it often not even comes to that point. Anyway sorry for the OT ;)
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
jfager 16y ago
Or she knew that the term "average" can just as validly refer to the mode as the mean, and was bored by the whole exercise.
- nandemo 16y ago
  I believe a sizeable proportion of HN users would benefit from reading these two articles by Philip Guo. I know I did. Geek behaviors present during conversations http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm Social tips for geeks http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/social-tips-for-geeks.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/social-tips-for-geeks.htm
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    I like the intention of the second one but it felt too prescriptive for my purposes. I've had decent success trying to learn to better empathize genuinely. Practice with public speaking and corporate politics and influencing are doing a lot to help me better understand how to befriend and relate to people that don't share my interests. It was initially surprising for me to be one of the geekier people in a building that is ostensibly full of IT workers. Things that work for me: Toastmasters, Dale Carnegie books, Rands in Repose (blog and/or books), regional sports blogs.
- dmlorenzetti 16y ago
  Correct. I could have written "bored by the whole exercise" rather than saying she had "checked out of the conversation". To recap-- my brother said, literally, one sentence. I added one more sentence, relating the question to another field of study. Our friend was instantly, irremediably, and unabashedly bored. From which I concluded that she took little pleasure in exploring any aspect of the statement she herself had introduced.
  - variety 16y ago
    That she was "bored" by the exercise doesn't necessarily mean that she doesn't share you and your brother's bold, hard-driving, searingly intense curiosity about the world, and the nature of our ability to infer knowledge about it. It might, instead, have had something do with the fact that the point you guys were trying to make was rather trivial.
jacobolus 16y ago
It’s actually quite possible to define quantities like mean and variance on a circular dimension like hours or angles, with definitions analogous to the conventional ones on the reals; it just takes a bit of mathematical cleverness. (The general field is sometimes called “circular statistics”, and for the mean specifically, Wikipedia has an article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities) That the two of you ignored your friend’s point and started talking about mathematics instead could be insulting† and she was may have been quite justifiably annoyed. Interpreting that annoyance as evidence that doctors are uncritical/uncurious/uncreative is pretty narrow-minded, IMO.§ † depending on your existing relationship and usual interactions. § obviously I wasn’t there and don’t know your friend, so can’t really judge. YMMV
bluesnowmonkey 16y ago
Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face. Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamiliarity with Cartesian coordinate systems.
- roel_v 16y ago
  For time, what would then be the average of let's say 3 and 9 o'clock? Center of the clock I presume, but what does that mean in terms of time? Or would you then need to define the average of several points in time as a non-point in time?
  - copper 16y ago
    0 o'clock could be interpreted as 12 o'clock too.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      The GP explicitly specified a 24-hour clock face, plus even on a 12-hour clock the question would remain.
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    Hand waving: I'm guessing that you could make a new vector from the average x and the average y. The direction would indicate the average time, and the length would indicate the certainty, so a length of zero would mean total uncertainty.
    - cscheid 16y ago
      That's pretty much exactly right - the variance of the von mises distribution is essentially the length of the average vector. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution
sliverstorm 16y ago
Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable. Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Do you want the person treating your kid for rickets to stand up and challenge the establishment and test a new hypothesis on the disease? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer it if the medical researchers did the challenging, questioning and validating, and the practicing doctors (in general) went with the established knowledge. In my opinion practice and research (of most any subject) are fundamentally divided, and so long as a person can maintain perspective I think no worse of them for preferring one side to the other.
- Waywocket 16y ago
  >Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Are you joking? Abso-fucking-lutely I do. Hell, I want everyone to be that sort of person. I contend that it is simply impossible for a person without those qualities to ever progress beyond 'adequate' at any task which is more than mechanical repetition of simple tasks.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Second this. Especially in medicine; not to go tl;dr on everybody again about my son's kidney disease, but our search through seven nephrologists stopped when we finally found one capable of looking at his case in a non-recipe-based manner.
rmc 16y ago
Or the doctor was splitting the clock in half hour chunks (or similar). "born at 3am" probably means "born between 2:45am and 3:15am". If a baby was born at 3:02am, the next day they will say "I got no sleep, a baby was born at 3am last night!".
epo 16y ago
How did this get voted for? The doctor is far more knowledgeable about a VERY complex engineering system (the female reproductive system) than you or your brother are ever likely to be in any sphere of knowledge. She probably hadn't, as you put it, checked out, she was just being polite and waiting for you to stop babbling pedantic trivia. Perhaps amusing herself by wondering if you might have Aspergers. Your final 'impression' of her thought processes is banal and insulting. And people wonder why geeks don't have girlfriends.
beambot 16y ago
You can still say "average" (mean) for distributions over cycles (eg. on circles, von Mises distributions are analogous to Gaussians). von Mises on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution

nostrademons 16y ago

Unless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...

jamesbritt 16y ago
http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
kes 16y ago
Now you will know: http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html

carbocation 16y ago

The charitable interpretation (for your OB friend) is that she was not speaking literally, and got bored when you started perseverating on her hyperbole. The more likely explanation is that your analysis is indeed correct.

mbreese 16y ago
I'd say the more likely case is that she wasn't speaking literally. Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means. Couple that with the fact that most doctors know just enough statistics to get by, and "the most common time for a baby to be born is 3am" gets translated to "the average baby is born at 3am". The bored look was probably just her rolling her eyes.
- roel_v 16y ago
  "Doctors are usually trying to explain things to people who aren't going to know what modal means." I talk to doctors quite often lately, with a daughter on the way and all, and the first few times I felt a bit miffed at what I took for her talking down to us. When it got to an absurd level with some nurses (who explained things like how to add several numbers by lining them up, putting a line underneath with a plus sign next to it, and then using a calculator to find the result (true story)), I thought about it some more and it must be because they need to target the lowest common denominator. Which I guess is someone with an iq of 85 or so, as people lower would get special counseling I think. I've tried to find effective methods to communicate to people that they can skip some of the 'duh' parts, but that's not easy. Just saying 'listen I'm no dumb' or even worse, 'hi I'm <name> and I'm a <name profession that requires university degree>' makes you look arrogant and will antagonize people, and they might not dumb it down on purpose anyway, so they might not have a way of not dumbing it down, either. Usually after a few talks people pick up the vibe on how fast you understand things and what you already know, but when you have many different contacts with various people it often not even comes to that point. Anyway sorry for the OT ;)
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago

jfager 16y ago

Or she knew that the term "average" can just as validly refer to the mode as the mean, and was bored by the whole exercise.

nandemo 16y ago
I believe a sizeable proportion of HN users would benefit from reading these two articles by Philip Guo. I know I did. Geek behaviors present during conversations http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm Social tips for geeks http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/social-tips-for-geeks.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/social-tips-for-geeks.htm
- dpritchett 16y ago
  I like the intention of the second one but it felt too prescriptive for my purposes. I've had decent success trying to learn to better empathize genuinely. Practice with public speaking and corporate politics and influencing are doing a lot to help me better understand how to befriend and relate to people that don't share my interests. It was initially surprising for me to be one of the geekier people in a building that is ostensibly full of IT workers. Things that work for me: Toastmasters, Dale Carnegie books, Rands in Repose (blog and/or books), regional sports blogs.
dmlorenzetti 16y ago
Correct. I could have written "bored by the whole exercise" rather than saying she had "checked out of the conversation". To recap-- my brother said, literally, one sentence. I added one more sentence, relating the question to another field of study. Our friend was instantly, irremediably, and unabashedly bored. From which I concluded that she took little pleasure in exploring any aspect of the statement she herself had introduced.
- variety 16y ago
  That she was "bored" by the exercise doesn't necessarily mean that she doesn't share you and your brother's bold, hard-driving, searingly intense curiosity about the world, and the nature of our ability to infer knowledge about it. It might, instead, have had something do with the fact that the point you guys were trying to make was rather trivial.

jacobolus 16y ago

It’s actually quite possible to define quantities like mean and variance on a circular dimension like hours or angles, with definitions analogous to the conventional ones on the reals; it just takes a bit of mathematical cleverness. (The general field is sometimes called “circular statistics”, and for the mean specifically, Wikipedia has an article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities) That the two of you ignored your friend’s point and started talking about mathematics instead could be insulting† and she was may have been quite justifiably annoyed. Interpreting that annoyance as evidence that doctors are uncritical/uncurious/uncreative is pretty narrow-minded, IMO.§ † depending on your existing relationship and usual interactions. § obviously I wasn’t there and don’t know your friend, so can’t really judge. YMMV

bluesnowmonkey 16y ago

Of course you can average times of day, as well as wind directions. Express them as vectors on a 2-D plane, then separately average the components in each dimension. Although this is somewhat obvious in the case of wind measurements, it works for times of day as well if you think of them as points on a 24-hour clock face. Your medical friend was not checked out. She was busy stifling impolite laughter at your unfamiliarity with Cartesian coordinate systems.

roel_v 16y ago
For time, what would then be the average of let's say 3 and 9 o'clock? Center of the clock I presume, but what does that mean in terms of time? Or would you then need to define the average of several points in time as a non-point in time?
- copper 16y ago
  0 o'clock could be interpreted as 12 o'clock too.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    The GP explicitly specified a 24-hour clock face, plus even on a 12-hour clock the question would remain.
- DougBTX 16y ago
  Hand waving: I'm guessing that you could make a new vector from the average x and the average y. The direction would indicate the average time, and the length would indicate the certainty, so a length of zero would mean total uncertainty.
  - cscheid 16y ago
    That's pretty much exactly right - the variance of the von mises distribution is essentially the length of the average vector. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution

sliverstorm 16y ago

Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable. Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Do you want the person treating your kid for rickets to stand up and challenge the establishment and test a new hypothesis on the disease? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer it if the medical researchers did the challenging, questioning and validating, and the practicing doctors (in general) went with the established knowledge. In my opinion practice and research (of most any subject) are fundamentally divided, and so long as a person can maintain perspective I think no worse of them for preferring one side to the other.

Waywocket 16y ago
>Do you really want your doctor to be that sort of person? Are you joking? Abso-fucking-lutely I do. Hell, I want everyone to be that sort of person. I contend that it is simply impossible for a person without those qualities to ever progress beyond 'adequate' at any task which is more than mechanical repetition of simple tasks.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Second this. Especially in medicine; not to go tl;dr on everybody again about my son's kidney disease, but our search through seven nephrologists stopped when we finally found one capable of looking at his case in a non-recipe-based manner.

rmc 16y ago

Or the doctor was splitting the clock in half hour chunks (or similar). "born at 3am" probably means "born between 2:45am and 3:15am". If a baby was born at 3:02am, the next day they will say "I got no sleep, a baby was born at 3am last night!".

epo 16y ago

How did this get voted for? The doctor is far more knowledgeable about a VERY complex engineering system (the female reproductive system) than you or your brother are ever likely to be in any sphere of knowledge. She probably hadn't, as you put it, checked out, she was just being polite and waiting for you to stop babbling pedantic trivia. Perhaps amusing herself by wondering if you might have Aspergers. Your final 'impression' of her thought processes is banal and insulting. And people wonder why geeks don't have girlfriends.

beambot 16y ago

You can still say "average" (mean) for distributions over cycles (eg. on circles, von Mises distributions are analogous to Gaussians). von Mises on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Mises_distribution