5 ms·

Anesthesia, antibiotics, or vaccinations - to take some examples - are all not "serious traction" as far as medicine is concerned? What part of medicine will be

Anesthesia, antibiotics, or vaccinations - to take some examples - are all not "serious traction" as far as medicine is concerned? What part of medicine will be get serious traction from the internet?

toyg 3y ago
One could argue that the development of any technology, including medicine, is augmented by the internet allowing people to instantaneously pool knowledge and skills across the entire world. There are obvious benefits to that - the rates of technological development seen since the invention of telephone and fast transportation are sky-high, compared to pretty much the rest of known human history, so it stands to reason that the internet will do the same but even better. Would have we seen a COVID vaccine (or rather, multiple vaccines) in a matter of mere months, without the internet? Probably not - it took decades to get a vaccine for influenza. Looking back, I don't think we'll look at it like "the internet allowed us to create technology X and Y", but rather "the internet turned our tech development rates, across the board, into hockey sticks steeper than we'd ever seen before".
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  So far we don't see that hockey stick from the internet in medicine or even most technologies. I doubt that the Covid vaccine was developed so quickly because of the internet. The internet might have shaved a little bit time off, but it wasn't instrumental in the vaccine developement as far as I understand it. The development was a huge effort between governments, corporations, and science sitting atop decades of research. Did it make certain communications easier - for sure, but I struggle to see that as anywhere as big as changed processes in testing and roll-out.
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would be collectively spending rediscovering the same things. Because of peer review, we can cut down on time wasted pursing things that are flawed. HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99. History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet... There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine. The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.
      - DistractionRect 3y ago
        It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet. M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus. Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc. And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc. It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        My problem is that it seems to largely feature on the level of anecdata, but not make it beyond that. It is more a hypothesis like: the rather moderate aggregate progress wouldn't have happened without the internet - but how to show that? People managed huge coordination efforts before the internet (just take the US in WWII with half the GDP dedicated to war efforts). So claims about the effect of the internet from better coordination there need a lot to substantiate them.
- prewett 3y ago
  I talked to a guy in vaccine research after the pandemic and asked him why it went was produced so fast. He said that basically we'd already done years of RNA vaccine research but it hadn't been applied yet. We had the solution already at hand, so we got a vaccine quickly. I don't think the Internet was a big factor in why we got it so quickly. (It may or may not have been a factor in why we had the RNA vaccine ready to go at that point in time.)

toyg 3y ago

One could argue that the development of any technology, including medicine, is augmented by the internet allowing people to instantaneously pool knowledge and skills across the entire world. There are obvious benefits to that - the rates of technological development seen since the invention of telephone and fast transportation are sky-high, compared to pretty much the rest of known human history, so it stands to reason that the internet will do the same but even better. Would have we seen a COVID vaccine (or rather, multiple vaccines) in a matter of mere months, without the internet? Probably not - it took decades to get a vaccine for influenza. Looking back, I don't think we'll look at it like "the internet allowed us to create technology X and Y", but rather "the internet turned our tech development rates, across the board, into hockey sticks steeper than we'd ever seen before".

RandomLensman 3y ago
So far we don't see that hockey stick from the internet in medicine or even most technologies. I doubt that the Covid vaccine was developed so quickly because of the internet. The internet might have shaved a little bit time off, but it wasn't instrumental in the vaccine developement as far as I understand it. The development was a huge effort between governments, corporations, and science sitting atop decades of research. Did it make certain communications easier - for sure, but I struggle to see that as anywhere as big as changed processes in testing and roll-out.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Decades of research that was catalogued, indexed, and shared via the internet. We're talking about drastically cutting down on time people the world over would be collectively spending rediscovering the same things. Because of peer review, we can cut down on time wasted pursing things that are flawed. HN just recently followed the peer review process of LK-99 in basically real-time across the world. The results might seem trivial in hindsight, but it took leading experts the world over a bit of time to pin down and explain what was really being obversed. It probably saved the original authors years of work trying to refine and chase LK-99. History has shown the time and again, every advancement in communication has been a boon to human progress. Printing press, telegraph, transalantic//transcontinental telegraph cables, telephone, internet... There's plenty of papers posted here, and a lot of the break through papers are usually made on the shoulders of giants - connecting break throughs in seemingly disconnected disciplines/sub disciplines. HN sees this most frequently in maths papers, and the story is made easily digest able in breakdowns from quanta magazine. The internet has drastically accelerated the rate of human progress, and now we're on the cusp of removing the language barrier with automatic machine transmission.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I don't doubt the usefulness of the internet but where is the evidence of the "drastically accelerated rate of human progress"? Or rather what data is that translating into? Productivity growth it isn't. Life expectancy it isn't. Real wages it isn't necessarily. GDP growth it isn't really, either.
    - DistractionRect 3y ago
      It'll certainly depend on your yardstick, I agree. Scientically, technologically, we've seen more progress in under a century than we've seen in millennia. It's maybe easy to hand wave that off on advances in machine computation (computers), but computers are a globally coordinated effort. Foundaries, manufacturing techniques, CS research, etc are coordinated and advanced globally because of the internet. M-RNA vaccines are the cummulation of a decades of advances. Genetic sequencing was a major advancement, but actually being able to make sense of it and do something with that information, and then to go encode your own M-RNA and trick the body into producing parts of the virus in order to teach it about a virus it's never actually seen is soo far removed vaccines of old, which was basically repeated exposure to a similar, weaker virus. Could we have gotten here without the internet? Maybe? It's hard to tell, because the road to M-RNA vaccines was paved by decades of global coordination in the fields of CSE, virology, material science, chemistry, physics, etc etc. And this ignores everything that goes into manufacturing this at scale, coordinating availability/priority, etc. It's probably easier to look backwards and see what was lost and rediscovered. Feats of architectural engineering, Roman concrete, etc history is full of major advances being independently discovered and lost due to the inability to share, search, and archive information at scale
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        My problem is that it seems to largely feature on the level of anecdata, but not make it beyond that. It is more a hypothesis like: the rather moderate aggregate progress wouldn't have happened without the internet - but how to show that? People managed huge coordination efforts before the internet (just take the US in WWII with half the GDP dedicated to war efforts). So claims about the effect of the internet from better coordination there need a lot to substantiate them.
prewett 3y ago
I talked to a guy in vaccine research after the pandemic and asked him why it went was produced so fast. He said that basically we'd already done years of RNA vaccine research but it hadn't been applied yet. We had the solution already at hand, so we got a vaccine quickly. I don't think the Internet was a big factor in why we got it so quickly. (It may or may not have been a factor in why we had the RNA vaccine ready to go at that point in time.)