4 ms·

Vile. You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too

Vile. You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive. This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong. If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.

antithesizer 1y ago
That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s** if the positive is false or not.
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s* if the positive is false or not. At least we're still at the stage where they're bothering to find pretext. There is still hope.
  - bix6 1y ago
    Is there? They are already a few rungs up from illegal criminals. Not much further to get to anyone since these are approved visa holders. Im just waiting for them to declare all Californians as non-citizens at this point.
    - nrclark 1y ago
      That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union. Coastal Oregon and coastal Washington can come too.
      - bix6 1y ago
        I’m ready for it. Good luck to the rest of the country without our food and industry lol.
      - ramesh31 1y ago
        >That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union. I know this is just frustrated anger, but it does no good. Our union has survived more than one braindead administration before. We fought a war killing hundreds of thousands to save it for god's sake. We dealt with Zachary Tyler and Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland. We'll get past this moron and be stronger for it, just watch.
sixo 1y ago
The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.
- causal 1y ago
  False positives are still false positives. You don't decide to ignore a possible tumor because everybody's getting MRIs these days.
- shazbotter 1y ago
  MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.
  - sixo 1y ago
    huh, well, if it's true that "no amount of data will reduce them" then my point is wrong, but I highly doubt that's true.
    - empyrrhicist 1y ago
      The data is often a biopsy, which is invasive and potentially harmful.
- empyrrhicist 1y ago
  ... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.
  - sixo 1y ago
    Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match. Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb! The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.
geremiiah 1y ago
It's more akin to KYC and AML laws. I've heard many horror stories of bank/brokerage accounts being frozen despite all deposits being legitimate, not to mention not being able to transfer large amounts or not even being allowed to open an account. Meanwhile crooks somehow manage to have bank accounts in all the big banks without issues.

antithesizer 1y ago

That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s** if the positive is false or not.

ramesh31 1y ago
>That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s* if the positive is false or not. At least we're still at the stage where they're bothering to find pretext. There is still hope.
- bix6 1y ago
  Is there? They are already a few rungs up from illegal criminals. Not much further to get to anyone since these are approved visa holders. Im just waiting for them to declare all Californians as non-citizens at this point.
  - nrclark 1y ago
    That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union. Coastal Oregon and coastal Washington can come too.
    - bix6 1y ago
      I’m ready for it. Good luck to the rest of the country without our food and industry lol.
    - ramesh31 1y ago
      >That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union. I know this is just frustrated anger, but it does no good. Our union has survived more than one braindead administration before. We fought a war killing hundreds of thousands to save it for god's sake. We dealt with Zachary Tyler and Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland. We'll get past this moron and be stronger for it, just watch.

sixo 1y ago

The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.

causal 1y ago
False positives are still false positives. You don't decide to ignore a possible tumor because everybody's getting MRIs these days.
shazbotter 1y ago
MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.
- sixo 1y ago
  huh, well, if it's true that "no amount of data will reduce them" then my point is wrong, but I highly doubt that's true.
  - empyrrhicist 1y ago
    The data is often a biopsy, which is invasive and potentially harmful.
empyrrhicist 1y ago
... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.
- sixo 1y ago
  Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match. Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb! The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.

geremiiah 1y ago

It's more akin to KYC and AML laws. I've heard many horror stories of bank/brokerage accounts being frozen despite all deposits being legitimate, not to mention not being able to transfer large amounts or not even being allowed to open an account. Meanwhile crooks somehow manage to have bank accounts in all the big banks without issues.