I think you could say it's inevitable because of the size of both the good AND bad opportunities. Agree with you and the original point of the article that there COULD be a better way. We are reaping tons of bad outcomes across social media, crypto, AI, due to poor leadership(from every side really).
Imagine new coordination technology X. We can remove any specific tech reference to remove prior biases. Say it is a neutral technology that could enable new types of positive coordination as well as negative.
3 camps exist.
A: The grifters. They see the opportunity to exploit and individually gain.
B: The haters. They see the grifters and denigrate the technology entirely. Leaving no nuance or possibility for understanding the positive potential.
C: The believers. They see the grift and the positive opportunity. They try and steer the technology towards the positive and away from the negative.
The basic formula for where the technology ends up is -2(A)-(B) +C. It's a bit of a broad strokes brush but you can probably guess where to bin our current political parties into these negative categories. We need leadership which can identify and understand the positive outcomes and push us towards those directions. I see very little strength anywhere from the tech leaders to politicians to the social media mob to get us there. For that, we all suffer.
This has nothing to do with "knowing how to use a computer."
Looking at a screen while you check through dozens of flags and billing related documentation instead of looking at the patient is much less personable.
This is one of those extremely important points that we say every once in a while and then forget to emphasize. Opposing good ideas or supporting bad ideas because they somehow get tagged into weird ideological buckets along with completely unrelated issues is a big reason why our political system is so dysfunctional.
Wow this is an excellent point and really undermines the article conclusions. We should always be looking at unadjusted scores as well as a whole series of adjusted scores with a variety of methods.
Just grabbing one highly adjusted score and drawing conclusions solely off of that is not enough. It's really only giving you one piece of a very complex puzzle in the case of something like education scores.
Observational stats in social sciences turns out to be a lot like epidemiology and strongly held conclusions are hard won.
China's share of of electricity production from coal is at 60% as of 2023[1] compared to 16% for the US[2]. That's down from 80% in 2005.
It currently generates 35% of its electricity from renewable sources as of 2023 compared to 41% in the US.
The US has been replacing coal with gas - gas was 19% in 2005 and 42% in 2023.
China first exceeded the US's annual carbon emissions in 2006 with both outputting about 6 billion tons. Since then the US has declined to a bit under 5 billion tons in 2023 while China has doubled to a bit under 12 billion tons[3] making it by far the largest emitter in notional terms per year.
While the Western world's carbon emissions have been in decline for years (with the US still the highest ex-China), China and India's emissions continue to climb at significant rates. It's true that China is building enormous amounts of renewable energy, but that can be further generalized to China is building enormous amounts of energy production across all sources, dirty and clean.
The reason I'm skeptical of that framing is it implies coal production is being replaced by clean energy, rather than total energy production being increased.
Coal production continues to climb[1] and construction of new coal plants hit a 10 year high in 2024[2]. China accounted for 95% of the world’s new coal power construction activity in 2023[3].
Lots of countries announce decarbonization goals, but I will remain skeptical until the data show progress.
> The reason I'm skeptical of that framing is it implies coal production is being replaced by clean energy, rather than total energy production being increased.
I wasn't intending to imply that. It's entirely possible China might get to 90% renewable energy production without shutting down a single coal plant.
> Lots of countries announce decarbonization goals, but I will remain skeptical until the data show progress.
Sure, but that doesn't conflict with having more and more of your energy production being renewable.
And they don't have access to cheap natural gas so the financial incentive to switch to renewables is even stronger. Even more so given the inability of coal to flexibly produce power throughout the day, so cheaper renewables just completely kill the economic feasibility of coal.
I think you have that flexibility backwards. Coal can be ramped up relatively quickly and operates in nearly all weather conditions, but wind and solar are at the whim nature. Unless you're only talking hydropower and nuclear power which China is also building, but those like coal have significant upfront capital investments and minimum scale.
Either way, the idea that coal is economically infeasible is contradicted by the fact that China is building huge amounts of it[1]. For China energy production is an "and" question, not an "or" question.
That's exactly what coal is bad at. Anything less than a day is bad news for coal. Which means that all this coal capacity is building is going to be for rarer seasonal events, and going to be mostly sitting unused.
To manufacture products exported to the west. It's always this argument... You need to look at emissions by country of final destination of the products, not by country of manufacture. In an age where a simple t-shirt is made in Bangladesh with cotton from Afghanistan it's ridiculous to use the latter measure.
You don't think domestic manufacturers will abuse labor and pollute?
The same party that wants to move manufacturing back to the US also wants to deregulate as much as possible, roll back labor rights and repeal environmental laws. The cost of moving manufacturing out of China and to the US is that the few Americans who can get work in a mostly AI driven and automated industry will eventually get treated and paid like Chinese labor.
I think that some domestic manufacturers will abuse labor and pollute, you will never have 100% compliance. However it is far easier to police things here then somewhere without our regulatory framework. If Nike could get away with child sweatshops in the US, why did they bother moving abroad?
Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to. And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that champions labor rights and environmental regulations want to move manufacturing back to the US? It's very easy to say you support factory worker rights when you don't have any factory workers.
>Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to.
But we're going to. You know that's the deal.
>And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that champions labor rights and environmental regulations want to move manufacturing back to the US?
Both parties are strongly pro-business and pro-manufacturing[0], and the Democrats did campaign on reshoring just because it's a no-brainer, but they seem more focused on preserving labor rights and a living wage than do Republicans.
Democrats just recently changed their stance based on Trump's win, which is great if it helps the avg. worker.
We need to figure out how to structure our economy to benefit everyone:
>And manufacturing in particular embodies something that seems to be disappearing in today’s economy: jobs with decent pay and benefits available to workers without a college degree. The average factory worker earns more than $25 an hour before overtime; the typical retail worker makes less than $18 an hour.
It's fun to look back at these articles talking about how retail is taking off....now all the big boxes are dying, we replaced storefronts with a few warehouses.
Sure, the amount of labor going into making something has shrunk but so has the amount of labor required to sell something. Honestly, it's not just going to be just an AI driven and automated manufacturing industry. Healthcare, education and everything else seems to be falling into the same dark spiral.
> If we stopped buying shit we don't need, they could easily turn off a good portion of their coal powered electricity plants if they wanted.
If they wanted. China has a policy of overproduction, especially in raw materials like steel. While the US subsidizes consumption, China subsidizes production. It is not clear they would elect to scale back (and take the economic hit) even if Western consumers decided to voluntarily cut back (which also seems unlikely).
It's not that we haven't thought up the statistical tools. The core theoretical tools you need are there. It's that gathering the data that you need is extremely difficult and time consuming.
If you gather EHR or medical claims record data for vaccines for example, you have to take very seriously the biases and impact of missingness inherent in the data. Is that person you have no evidence of disease for truly not diseased or do they just have missing data? IS it missing because they just didnt go to the doctor because they're healthy enough to kick the disease on their own or because they're so financially unstable that they can't afford to consistently see their primary care doctor. Is the data missingness itself actually what's more correlated with the disease than the vacciation you are looking at?
Example: If your outcome is dementia then may be using cognitive tests that have a high level of variability due more to social class, education, test taking ability. Is receiving a fancy vaccine is more likely in an affluent area? Could be that correlation itself might completely explain away the positive effect that vaccine has on cognitive test scores.
In Alzheimer's you're often trying to correlate things that happen in early life with long term damage that only surfaces many many years later. Retrospective studies where you go back and ask sick or healthy people have recall bias where the sick ones remember more issues with themselves early on than healthy ones do even with the same early life issues.
Not trying to say epi is perfect or that there isn't room for improvement in tools (there absolutely is). But just like often happens when crossing over into the biological sciences there's a lot stickier problems than people outside the field realize.
Right, the data quality is usually crap. Beyond the issues you mentioned, patients often switch providers or health plans and their data doesn't get migrated. In the USA at least there is no centralized national repository for that data so the further back you try to go the more likely the data will just be missing (or incorrectly coded). In theory there are interoperability APIs and national networks to solve this problem but in practice a lot of systems still aren't properly connected.
For vaccinations specifically the CDC Immunization Gateway can be a good place to start. Most states also maintain their own immunization registries that can be queried through standard HL7 V2 Messaging and/or FHIR APIs if you have the appropriate permissions.
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