14 ms·

Work on these things

175 points by jger15 7y ago

jaimebuelta 7y ago
Is the American healthcare system the most influential? Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...
- m12k 7y ago
  I mean they pay roughly 3-4 times as much for the same level of service as the single payer healthcare in my country. So it's a massive market with much larger profit margins, the lack of vertical integration adds not just one, but many layers of profit generation (and total cost increase) compared to a single-payer solution, and you can skew the perverse incentives in favor of your product in ways that are not legal or possible in other countries (e.g. lobbying/bribing doctors to favor your new drug). So yes, it's definitely influential, and it attracts companies, but not only in favorable or sensible ways if you're a consumer/patient.
ptah 7y ago
> "American healthcare system" i would say it is more of a market than a system
- dTal 7y ago
  In what sense? Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Who is even in a position to do that? People get their insurance from their employers, and are treated at the nearest hospital (where the prices are an outright secret beforehand). I can't see how market economics apply even a little bit, as far as the person in need of care is concerned.
  - TheHypnotist 7y ago
    In my case, you have a choice between PPO and HSA. But i know people who opt to be on their spouses insurance.
    - knightofmars 7y ago
      The running joke in our office is, "If I get married again my spouse is going to work in government."
  - ianleeclark 7y ago
    >Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Market's don't require multiple sellers or even buys, see: monopolies and monopsonies.
- c0l0 7y ago
  How about "American ailmentprofit system"?
wazoox 7y ago
> South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies. On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism. See "kicking away the ladder" by Ha-Joon Chang.
- cdavid 7y ago
  I think that's exactly his point, actually, although I thought that was quite well understood. E.g. "How Asia works" explained the difference between taiwan/japan/s korea on one hand, and philipines/indonesia/malaysia on the other hand exactly around this axis. Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-with-dani-rodrik-e02cf8784b9d https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
  - rtpg 7y ago
    But... there's a clear policy angle here? There's no need to navel gaze about culture on this. If you follow the same policies that other major powers followed when they were growing (protectionism + heavy coordination between government and large coorporations) you will find growth. To be honest I feel so little empathy from this author and their post. I mean there's so much comprehensive studying about the american health care market. The US gov't has spent 50 years staring at it in trying to make it less of a nightmare! He poses the question of quantifying worker productivity in knowledge economies as if this hasn't been a topic of discussion and like 10 iterations for the past 50 years. He talks about a lack of criticism of institutions, when there are _centuries_ of criticism on various arms of the government and how they function. Political science is a whole branch of study! I just get the vibe that this person almost never actually reads books, and just reads pop science takes on economics all day. I mean he's probably a major player in economics but I guess that's kinda the point.
jamix 7y ago
> Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this? We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.
- greatestdana 7y ago
  It's over 7 million people. That seems like a robust dataset to me.
  - aabhay 7y ago
    The fact that it’s a smaller territory means that effects that would even out in larger territories don’t apply. I.e. it’s a relative effect. Here’s an example: suppose a large retirement community of Chinese immigrants exists in Hong Kong, raising the average age. In order for this kind of retirement community to shift the age distribution the same amount in a country 10x larger, that retirement community would have to be 10x or so larger as well. A 10x larger retirement community is way less likely. This isn’t to say that all small things lie on the extremes of the distribution, only that an extreme value is likelier to come from a smaller sample.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    > That seems like a robust dataset to me. Perhaps, but there's a wide distribution of age of death, and the author is fretting about a 5 year difference in life expectancy between 2 populations that are doing fine. Assuming someone can ever fully explain the cause of this life-expectancy difference, it's going to be multi-faceted and complex and amount to nothing more than a long list of generic advice and policy prescriptions that will go nowhere and probably be culturally incompatible.
haskellandchill 7y ago
> One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?
- aabhay 7y ago
  Agreed. This seems like a true ‘first world problem’.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    In what sense?
- harimau777 7y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Land-Single-Disorder-Frontier/dp/0674278712 https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Land-Single-Disorder-Frontier... https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf This one seems a little odd, but I included it for completeness. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002715603102 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027156031...
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  From what I recall having read, there are health improvements, financial improvements, having two parents is much better for raising children (from what I recall this is independent of the gender of the two parents), and there are larger systematic issues when significant portions of the population have difficulty finding a relationship (look at the purposed roles polygamy plays in destabilizing the Middle East or the social costs of China's one child policy that strongly influence people to have a single boy now that a few decades have passed).
monkeydust 7y ago
You do not need a Bloomberg terminal for everything but one for each industry vertical. What Bloomberg did for capital markets ..for.. healthcare...retail etc.
wslh 7y ago
I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart). Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gombosg 7y ago
  IMHO this is because of SEO. Whatever algorithms search companies make, those who exploit them (called SEO, whatever the hat color is) will have an advantage over those who don't.
  - lkschubert8 7y ago
    Unless the algorithm could actually detect "quality" (instead of poor analogs for it). Then if SEO couldn't really exploit it, SEO would just be making "quality" content.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - rchaud 7y ago
    SEO is only half the issue. Even a great SEO won't be able to get your site to rank if it only has 10 pages and new content is rarely added (think of a small company's marketing website). Search engines think volume of content and frequency of updates are positive signals, so in the past decade we have seen a deluge of "content marketing", with corporate blogs and media sites chock-full of absolute garbage clickbait and listicles, written by freelance copywriters for pennies per word. All to obtain a higher domain ranking, or domain authority. While users are looking for the needle in the haystack, websites are just making the haystack bigger to capture users who were looking in a different haystack.
m12k 7y ago
"Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields": I've been thinking a lot about this one lately. There's so much confusion (and willful disinformation) in the world when it comes to science, and so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this - that usually comes years later when a meta-study comes along. In most fields, as an outsider, you basically have to get lucky that one of these meta-studies has cropped up recently and you happen to talk to an expert that can point you at it. In medicine there is the Cochrane organization that does a pretty good job of communicating these findings in a clear way. But why isn't there something like this for all fields of science, constantly updated, so journalists, policy-makers and curious amateurs like myself have a single point of entry when we want to understand the state of the art in a given scientific field? A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy? It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.
- madhadron 7y ago
  > A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy? The Particle Data Group does this for high energy physics quite effectively. It's just not knowledge that laymen can absorb in a useful way.
- zirror 7y ago
  > "so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this" I respectfully disagree that journalists don't understand that. They do, they are just incentivized to fill their websites/shows with grabbing headlines to get more ad revenue. It's mainly an incentive problem, not an understanding problem.
dmos62 7y ago
IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.
- danShumway 7y ago
  I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well. I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?" It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work). Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.
perfunctory 7y ago
The top post on HN, muses about capital allocation, has no mention of climate change. I guess we are doomed.
- el_cujo 7y ago
  The point of this was to look at questions the author thought were interesting but maybe overlooked I think, not a "TOP 10 QUESTIONS WE NEED ANSWERED NOW OR THE HUMAN RACE IS DOOOOMED!!!" listicle.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- muzani 7y ago
  I think there's a lot allocated to it, both funds and brainpower. Maybe there should be more, but money is probably not the bottleneck. It's not necessarily the worst thing either. Some researchers think nuclear apocalypse is still more likely to cause human extinction, which could happen if too much political pressure goes upon climate change.
- tootie 7y ago
  I think the difference is we know as much as can know about it already. He is a research economist looking to acquire data, not solve problems.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  No surprise. The author is a middle aged conservative economist. These people are more concerned with the next 30 years of gains than climate change, as they won’t be around holding the bag when crops start to fail.
- viburnum 7y ago
  Tyler Cowen’s whole gimmick is to play dumb and distract people from the actual issue. Back when unemployment was 10% he wrote about “zero marginal product” people. He literally called people useless. As if the financial crisis was caused by video games and dirty movies on the internet. When pressed on it he admitted he doesn’t know much about macroeconomics. Change the subject, then play dumb, that’s his only move.
AznHisoka 7y ago
"Bloomberg Terminal for everything. Figure out a way to build a growing corpus of structured data across the broadest variety of domains." What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?
- greatestdana 7y ago
  probably in places that just got connected to the internet
- nicholast 7y ago
  This already kind of exists with Wolfram language's built in knowledge-base.
nimbius 7y ago
>A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system. im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest. >Who are the actors and what are their incentives? Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.
- analog31 7y ago
  In my view, the only way to figure out how the healthcare system works is to own the whole thing.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > im afraid this might be a moving target at best Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed. Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system. When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
- 7y ago
kd5bjo 7y ago
Point of order: Based on the anti-linkbait guideline for titles, can this be changed to something less imperative and more informative? “Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe someone can come upwith something better.
type-2 7y ago
This.. doesn't make much sense actually.
smolder 7y ago
Society failing some potentially super effective people is observable. If we employed half as many tricks to align people with challenging (skills-appropriate) and socially valuable work as we do to align potential buyers with products, I think a lot more would get done and a lot more people could live meaningful lives. I know several examples of people not doing things they're good at. Actively marketing yourself as a requirement for getting valuable work is an obstacle for many. Sometimes business culture is an obstacle. Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control. I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential. Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
GoodJokes 7y ago
This is a pretty unoriginal list of libertarian talking points. Classic “smart” person asking questions that have been studied over and over and over and thinking they are the first to ask.
skuthus 7y ago
Bloomberg Terminal for everything Isn't that Wolfram Alpha?
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  I interpreted this as building a terminal for each of all the various domains out there. Not just 1 Terminal with all the different data you need. That would close to impossible, and impractical to build. Rather, focus on a specific domain, like startup funding for instance, organize/collect data on that, and allow people to draw correlations and insights from that data. And to answer your question, does Wolfram Alpha tell me how much funding all food delivery startups had in 2019?
  - OkGoDoIt 7y ago
    Would the ideal form of this look substantially different from crunchbase? I’ve never used a Bloomberg terminal myself, is this suggesting something about the user experience or just having all the data centralized in one place?
    - AznHisoka 7y ago
      It would not. startup funding was an example of a domain where there are products like crunch base that just collect, aggregate and centralize all that data. The user experience is the easy part
nathan_compton 7y ago
The dismal science indeed.
seoservicedelhi 7y ago
Black hat SEO still works? https://delhiseoservice.com https://delhiseoservice.com

175 points by jger15 7y ago

Is the American healthcare system the most influential? Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...

m12k 7y ago
I mean they pay roughly 3-4 times as much for the same level of service as the single payer healthcare in my country. So it's a massive market with much larger profit margins, the lack of vertical integration adds not just one, but many layers of profit generation (and total cost increase) compared to a single-payer solution, and you can skew the perverse incentives in favor of your product in ways that are not legal or possible in other countries (e.g. lobbying/bribing doctors to favor your new drug). So yes, it's definitely influential, and it attracts companies, but not only in favorable or sensible ways if you're a consumer/patient.

ptah 7y ago

> "American healthcare system" i would say it is more of a market than a system

dTal 7y ago
In what sense? Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Who is even in a position to do that? People get their insurance from their employers, and are treated at the nearest hospital (where the prices are an outright secret beforehand). I can't see how market economics apply even a little bit, as far as the person in need of care is concerned.
- TheHypnotist 7y ago
  In my case, you have a choice between PPO and HSA. But i know people who opt to be on their spouses insurance.
  - knightofmars 7y ago
    The running joke in our office is, "If I get married again my spouse is going to work in government."
- ianleeclark 7y ago
  >Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Market's don't require multiple sellers or even buys, see: monopolies and monopsonies.
c0l0 7y ago
How about "American ailmentprofit system"?

wazoox 7y ago

> South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies. On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism. See "kicking away the ladder" by Ha-Joon Chang.

cdavid 7y ago
I think that's exactly his point, actually, although I thought that was quite well understood. E.g. "How Asia works" explained the difference between taiwan/japan/s korea on one hand, and philipines/indonesia/malaysia on the other hand exactly around this axis. Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-with-dani-rodrik-e02cf8784b9d https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
- rtpg 7y ago
  But... there's a clear policy angle here? There's no need to navel gaze about culture on this. If you follow the same policies that other major powers followed when they were growing (protectionism + heavy coordination between government and large coorporations) you will find growth. To be honest I feel so little empathy from this author and their post. I mean there's so much comprehensive studying about the american health care market. The US gov't has spent 50 years staring at it in trying to make it less of a nightmare! He poses the question of quantifying worker productivity in knowledge economies as if this hasn't been a topic of discussion and like 10 iterations for the past 50 years. He talks about a lack of criticism of institutions, when there are _centuries_ of criticism on various arms of the government and how they function. Political science is a whole branch of study! I just get the vibe that this person almost never actually reads books, and just reads pop science takes on economics all day. I mean he's probably a major player in economics but I guess that's kinda the point.

jamix 7y ago

> Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this? We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.

greatestdana 7y ago
It's over 7 million people. That seems like a robust dataset to me.
- aabhay 7y ago
  The fact that it’s a smaller territory means that effects that would even out in larger territories don’t apply. I.e. it’s a relative effect. Here’s an example: suppose a large retirement community of Chinese immigrants exists in Hong Kong, raising the average age. In order for this kind of retirement community to shift the age distribution the same amount in a country 10x larger, that retirement community would have to be 10x or so larger as well. A 10x larger retirement community is way less likely. This isn’t to say that all small things lie on the extremes of the distribution, only that an extreme value is likelier to come from a smaller sample.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > That seems like a robust dataset to me. Perhaps, but there's a wide distribution of age of death, and the author is fretting about a 5 year difference in life expectancy between 2 populations that are doing fine. Assuming someone can ever fully explain the cause of this life-expectancy difference, it's going to be multi-faceted and complex and amount to nothing more than a long list of generic advice and policy prescriptions that will go nowhere and probably be culturally incompatible.

haskellandchill 7y ago

> One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?

aabhay 7y ago
Agreed. This seems like a true ‘first world problem’.
- icebraining 7y ago
  In what sense?
harimau777 7y ago
https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Land-Single-Disorder-Frontier/dp/0674278712 https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Land-Single-Disorder-Frontier... https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf This one seems a little odd, but I included it for completeness. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002715603102 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027156031...
SkyBelow 7y ago
From what I recall having read, there are health improvements, financial improvements, having two parents is much better for raising children (from what I recall this is independent of the gender of the two parents), and there are larger systematic issues when significant portions of the population have difficulty finding a relationship (look at the purposed roles polygamy plays in destabilizing the Middle East or the social costs of China's one child policy that strongly influence people to have a single boy now that a few decades have passed).

monkeydust 7y ago

You do not need a Bloomberg terminal for everything but one for each industry vertical. What Bloomberg did for capital markets ..for.. healthcare...retail etc.

wslh 7y ago

I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart). Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gombosg 7y ago
IMHO this is because of SEO. Whatever algorithms search companies make, those who exploit them (called SEO, whatever the hat color is) will have an advantage over those who don't.
- lkschubert8 7y ago
  Unless the algorithm could actually detect "quality" (instead of poor analogs for it). Then if SEO couldn't really exploit it, SEO would just be making "quality" content.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rchaud 7y ago
  SEO is only half the issue. Even a great SEO won't be able to get your site to rank if it only has 10 pages and new content is rarely added (think of a small company's marketing website). Search engines think volume of content and frequency of updates are positive signals, so in the past decade we have seen a deluge of "content marketing", with corporate blogs and media sites chock-full of absolute garbage clickbait and listicles, written by freelance copywriters for pennies per word. All to obtain a higher domain ranking, or domain authority. While users are looking for the needle in the haystack, websites are just making the haystack bigger to capture users who were looking in a different haystack.

m12k 7y ago

"Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields": I've been thinking a lot about this one lately. There's so much confusion (and willful disinformation) in the world when it comes to science, and so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this - that usually comes years later when a meta-study comes along. In most fields, as an outsider, you basically have to get lucky that one of these meta-studies has cropped up recently and you happen to talk to an expert that can point you at it. In medicine there is the Cochrane organization that does a pretty good job of communicating these findings in a clear way. But why isn't there something like this for all fields of science, constantly updated, so journalists, policy-makers and curious amateurs like myself have a single point of entry when we want to understand the state of the art in a given scientific field? A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy? It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.

madhadron 7y ago
> A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy? The Particle Data Group does this for high energy physics quite effectively. It's just not knowledge that laymen can absorb in a useful way.
zirror 7y ago
> "so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this" I respectfully disagree that journalists don't understand that. They do, they are just incentivized to fill their websites/shows with grabbing headlines to get more ad revenue. It's mainly an incentive problem, not an understanding problem.

dmos62 7y ago

IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.

danShumway 7y ago
I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well. I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?" It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work). Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  Measuring software developer productivity is a hard problem. But I totally agree that the biggest production drain in any software team is bad management and bad direction. Building the wrong thing faster is not going to help much. Not wasting time building the thing that the marketing manager thought would be cool while on a night out with the CEO would help more.

perfunctory 7y ago

The top post on HN, muses about capital allocation, has no mention of climate change. I guess we are doomed.

el_cujo 7y ago
The point of this was to look at questions the author thought were interesting but maybe overlooked I think, not a "TOP 10 QUESTIONS WE NEED ANSWERED NOW OR THE HUMAN RACE IS DOOOOMED!!!" listicle.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
muzani 7y ago
I think there's a lot allocated to it, both funds and brainpower. Maybe there should be more, but money is probably not the bottleneck. It's not necessarily the worst thing either. Some researchers think nuclear apocalypse is still more likely to cause human extinction, which could happen if too much political pressure goes upon climate change.
tootie 7y ago
I think the difference is we know as much as can know about it already. He is a research economist looking to acquire data, not solve problems.
wasdfff 7y ago
No surprise. The author is a middle aged conservative economist. These people are more concerned with the next 30 years of gains than climate change, as they won’t be around holding the bag when crops start to fail.
viburnum 7y ago
Tyler Cowen’s whole gimmick is to play dumb and distract people from the actual issue. Back when unemployment was 10% he wrote about “zero marginal product” people. He literally called people useless. As if the financial crisis was caused by video games and dirty movies on the internet. When pressed on it he admitted he doesn’t know much about macroeconomics. Change the subject, then play dumb, that’s his only move.

AznHisoka 7y ago

"Bloomberg Terminal for everything. Figure out a way to build a growing corpus of structured data across the broadest variety of domains." What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?

greatestdana 7y ago
probably in places that just got connected to the internet
nicholast 7y ago
This already kind of exists with Wolfram language's built in knowledge-base.

nimbius 7y ago

>A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system. im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest. >Who are the actors and what are their incentives? Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.

analog31 7y ago
In my view, the only way to figure out how the healthcare system works is to own the whole thing.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
> im afraid this might be a moving target at best Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed. Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system. When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
7y ago

kd5bjo 7y ago

Point of order: Based on the anti-linkbait guideline for titles, can this be changed to something less imperative and more informative? “Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe someone can come upwith something better.

type-2 7y ago

This.. doesn't make much sense actually.

smolder 7y ago

Society failing some potentially super effective people is observable. If we employed half as many tricks to align people with challenging (skills-appropriate) and socially valuable work as we do to align potential buyers with products, I think a lot more would get done and a lot more people could live meaningful lives. I know several examples of people not doing things they're good at. Actively marketing yourself as a requirement for getting valuable work is an obstacle for many. Sometimes business culture is an obstacle. Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control. I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential. Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

GoodJokes 7y ago

This is a pretty unoriginal list of libertarian talking points. Classic “smart” person asking questions that have been studied over and over and over and thinking they are the first to ask.

skuthus 7y ago

Bloomberg Terminal for everything Isn't that Wolfram Alpha?

AznHisoka 7y ago
I interpreted this as building a terminal for each of all the various domains out there. Not just 1 Terminal with all the different data you need. That would close to impossible, and impractical to build. Rather, focus on a specific domain, like startup funding for instance, organize/collect data on that, and allow people to draw correlations and insights from that data. And to answer your question, does Wolfram Alpha tell me how much funding all food delivery startups had in 2019?
- OkGoDoIt 7y ago
  Would the ideal form of this look substantially different from crunchbase? I’ve never used a Bloomberg terminal myself, is this suggesting something about the user experience or just having all the data centralized in one place?
  - AznHisoka 7y ago
    It would not. startup funding was an example of a domain where there are products like crunch base that just collect, aggregate and centralize all that data. The user experience is the easy part

nathan_compton 7y ago

The dismal science indeed.

seoservicedelhi 7y ago

Black hat SEO still works? https://delhiseoservice.com https://delhiseoservice.com