4 ms·

The way we figure out how to catch issues before you notice them (i.e. proactively keeping you healthy) and figure out the best ways to fix them (i.e. reactivel

• nlkkjhlkjsd 4mo ago
  I've been reading this website on and off for years now, and I remember one time I read that a silicon valley startup was selling a "smart cup" that would send you detailed statistics of how much water you drank (assuming you used your smart cup for every drink throughout the day). I suspect if I pitched this to doctors, they would say just drink when your thirsty; you don't need all that data. But that's not the point, right? The cup cost way more than your average cup. There's a certain type of person who will spare no expense on gadgets and supplements that promise "wellness," and it doesn't matter if it actually produces results or not. Ray Kurzweil supposedly takes dozens of vitamin pills a day, and I imagine the end result is expensive piss, but guys like that will pay anything for the fantasy that they could live forever. I'm not a doctor, so I can't say if this midjourney stuff has actual value. But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. It just smells too much like one of those pricey, dubious wellness products, and a lot of us here are the ideal marks for such a scam.
  • zephyreon 4mo ago
    > But considering they first plan to deliver this in a fancy spa, and that it's coming from a tech company, not pharma, my reflex is to question the medical value of this data. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the entire pharma industry is not exactly known for their motivation to research and develop therapies for the betterment of humanity. Case in point, the opioid crisis, wherein pharma’s goal was to just sell as much of the drugs as possible without regard for the impact those drugs were having on the people taking them. I’m not saying this to defend tech — they’re guilty of the same things. I am saying this to suggest that if this play by Midjourney to reject VC funding and really lean into a community supported research lab works then you might end up with something closer to an altruistic approach than you would have otherwise.
    • bsiverly 4mo ago
      It all depends how many times I need to go to their med spa to get the benefits of the imaging.
  • moduspol 4mo ago
    I think the only way you figure out which data has value is by collecting it first. And I don't trust pharma any more than I trust tech. I'm 100% OK with health-conscious yuppies that have too much disposable income being the guinea pigs paying for this until if/when it demonstrates medical value.
  • pigpop 4mo ago
    It's funny because these criticisms are similar to the ones that Raymond Damadian faced when he was trying to develop the MRI. He was criticized for just being a doctor and not an NMR specialist, criticized for making bold claims based on the crude initial images that he presented, criticized for being too exuberant about the potential of the technology, criticized for only having a small group of non-expert graduate students and his own self-taught electronics and machining knowledge. He eventually founded his own company to commercialize the technology and even then he fought an uphill battle for 8 more years.
    • stalfie 4mo ago
      The criticism is also similar to those faced by Theranos. Survivorship bias is always a factor when looking backwards.
• nancyminusone 4mo ago
  I can easily and cheaply generate nore megabytes per second per dollar by oversampling a heart rate monitor at hundreds of megahertz. Hell, why not hook up a second channel to the same signal and record it twice for double the megabytes? Do you see the problem here? "yeah, but nobody's doing that" Well, then it certainly is odd of them to frame it tgat way, isn't it?
  • sbarre 4mo ago
    I think you (and others) are getting caught up in your own worse-case interpretation of the words of that statement, instead of looking at the intent of it. It is perhaps not the best wording but I think it's pretty easy to take that "megabytes per second per dollar" statement and choose to interpret it less poorly, and more like "having better, cheaper and more abundant useful data about yourself and your health".
    • airstrike 4mo ago
      Hard to say it's actually more useful data
    • ForgotIdAgain 4mo ago
      The massive data gathering part should only be part of the learning phase of the system imo, once it get a good model of reality it should infer useful knowledge information from few data, like an expert.
    • nancyminusone 4mo ago
      I'm sorry, I do not take implied statements lightly in regards to medical.
      • CooCooCaCha 4mo ago
        The only relevant implication is the word “useful”. Clearly we want useful data, that’s obvious.
        • 4mo ago
• MichaelZuo 4mo ago
  That is a good point. There’s no point arguing about how well the map correlates with the territory… if the map isn’t even in your hands yet.
• christina97 4mo ago
  GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data. Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?
  • andai 4mo ago
    The synthetic doctor is raised on megabytes. (They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)
  • moduspol 4mo ago
    I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.
    • jmye 4mo ago
      > I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd. Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?
      • moduspol 4mo ago
        > What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd. It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were. > Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context? I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.
        • 4mo ago
• mawadev 4mo ago
  I hope it doesn't proactively Xray me 5 times a day
• cseleborg 4mo ago
  It's not about being against technology. It's that we know the simple rules that will keep us healthy most of the time, and they don't need any technology at all. Eat healthy meals. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Get enough rest. Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't do drugs. Spend enough time with people. Serve others. Spend time outside. Midjourney Medical looks amazingly cool. But it, and megabytes of data, is not what we really need.
  • moduspol 4mo ago
    We only learned how to do a lot of those things because we gathered and analyzed data to find out how best to do them! "Eat healthy meals" means something completely different today than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. How you exercise matters a lot. Smoking wasn't always considered unhealthy, nor was drinking. These "simple rules" and what they actually mean have been refined quite a bit. You figure out this stuff by gathering and analyzing data. Whether or not this specific implementation will result in more meaningful actionable steps, I guess we'll see.
    • pigpop 4mo ago
      Exactly, if they do reach their goal of deploying tens of thousands of these machines allowing everyone to scan their body frequently and cheaply then even if there are limitations to this technology it will still provide a massive amount of longitudinal data about the human body and the impacts of lifestyle, age, pharmaceutical effects, etc. The person you replied to mentioned diet and exercise, that seems like an area that would benefit directly from this type of scan. Being able to track the effect on body composition in a highly accurate way where we know exactly how much muscle and fat are gained or lost and where that's happening could tell us a lot about not only the effect on the "average person" but for each individual. I'm sure there are many other less obvious things that could be tracked using this technology.
    • cseleborg 4mo ago
      True, we conducted science, part of which involved gathering and analysing data, to refine those "simple rules", though I'd say they've been pretty stable for a long time. Both our unhealthy habits, and the "simple rules" to keep us healthy, have been around for decades. Building devices that give us gigabytes of data won't change anything. Dr Peter Attia makes a compelling argument in his book "Outlive" that science, as it is structured now, has achieved miracles when it comes to injuries and infectious diseases, but has been more or less powerless, for entirely systemic reasons, to do anything about neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases or against cancer and diabetes. His book is well worth reading to understand his argument--but the gist of it is that those require lifestyle changes.
• lanstin 4mo ago
  data without theories is not, in general, useful. Also the salient data in the human body is at several different size scales - centimeters is ok, millimeters is good, much goes on at the micrometer and ångström scales (blood type, mitochondria, receptor shapes, expressed proteins, etc.). If this company was a bunch of biology grad students getting the AI bug, I'd be hopefully curious, but for a bunch of "generate images" folks to try to go back from low-res images to biology, seems a bit naive. Like not knowing how much DNA and RNA information there is in the body naive. I'm sure their leaders are good at financial engineering, but for effectively "proactively keeping you healthy", mmm, maybe not. Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc. As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.