3 ms·
Sure, but the simultaneous rise of other immune problems (including gut problems) is an interesting coincidence. The strangest difference between the medical a
by nomel 3y ago
Sure, but the simultaneous rise of other immune problems (including gut problems) is an interesting coincidence.
The strangest difference between the medical and engineering world that I've seen is that, in engineering, coincidences are signal with significant importance that often expose corner case problems, or something deeper. In medicine, coincidences are usually disregarded. Interesting research usually starts with coincidence, since the only other mechanism is having to wait for someone to, coincidentally, think of that same.
Definitely different worlds. But, practitioners are far removed from research, and coincidence/curiosity isn't actionable, so it makes some sense.
- kazinator 3y agoIn engineering, how seriously do you investigate a report about one unit out of ten millions, compared to one in a thousand.
- nomel 3y agoWhat's the context for these sorts of scales your'e giving? FM is estimated to around 2% adults. CFS is maybe around 1.3%. And, medical reporting is, objectively [1], terrible. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16689555/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16689555/
- jfim 3y agoWe had a bug at a previous employer that would cause many of the main database replicas to crash. We isolated it to a collision in the code that serializes query predicates, which happened about one time out of 2^32ish queries. So yes, relatively rare occurrences do get investigated.