Why do people on HN consistently presume that they somehow know better than the experts? It’s distressing to me that anybody can say something like this with a straight face.
But seriously, the amount of people on here trivializing modern medicine isn't helping matters.
Granted, neither is business-as-usual, but a 30-day "ventilator boot camp" for untrained professionals is going to kill far more people than it helps. And a poor allocation of resources during a time of scarcity.
It's absolutely incredible. But that's exactly the kind of attitude that 'move fast and break things' fosters.
Everything you've written here is inconsistent and contradictory, and you desperately try to derail the conversation and change the subject whenever anyone points that out, then you run away when you realize you've painted yourself into a corner and are getting called on it.
Just look at how many downvotes and flags you're getting, and how many of your postings are light colored, dead, and hidden. You're well on your way to a shadow ban. I wonder how long it will take you to figure it out that the only people replying to you have "showdead" set to true, because they love to see you floundering.
If somebody's paying you by the hour for trolling, then they certainly are not getting their money's worth, because the moderation system is working, as the text in your posts becomes lighter and lighter until your posts are hidden and nobody sees them, thankfully.
Go back to Gamergate where you came from, mistermann.
Perhaps you think our capacity won't be overwhelmed. Then it would make perfect sense not to bother training amateur operators. If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.
Going from zero to medical professional - not a doctor, just someone who can perform invasive medical procedures without killing a large number of people - isn't 30 days of work. Ignoring that reality will recklessly endanger people's lives.
If we're talking veterinarians, dentists, nurses, residents, MDs in unrelated specialties - then sure! They actually have the requisite knowlege and manual dexterity to cross-train. But going from, say SWE to ventilator operator, is not a 30 day crash course.
> If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.
Because then you end up wasting a life and keeping a ventilator occupied, when there are much more efficient ways to kill patients that don't involve misusing a ventilator.
Former scientist, including (lab side) FDA trials. Medicine is complicated. Even sterile technique, to make sure you don't inadvertently give your patient a life-threatening infection in the process of "helping" them, can take years to get right. This is true of the most routine aspects of any kind of medical work.
But, do tell: since my "intuition" is so obviously wrong, I want to hear all about your empirical research. Or let's just start with your credentials, medical or otherwise.
This pretty much dissolves your only real objection, that we'd be keeping a ventilator occupied that would otherwise be in use. Nope. The solution to a deficit of ventilators is producing more - not letting people die without them.
Generally, you are trying to invent reasons and restrictions to make trying to train ventilator-operators seem like a bad idea rather than understanding or advancing how the idea might be viable. An example of this is how you acknowledge that training other medical adjacent professionals (e.g. vetrenarians) would likely work. Great, you agree the idea could work. If you expect that our capacity will be overwhelmed then presumably you think we should training additional operators. Instead of reaching that conclusion you imagine reasons to object to the idea though.
A SWE would likely be worse than a vet after a bootcamp. That's a good reason to have some entry requirements to the bootcamp and those requirements could be relaxed or strengthened depending on where we expect demand to be in 30 days relative to supply. A SWE through a 30-day bootcamp would likely be better than nothing.
The other main constraint you've imagined is that they would need to save more people than they kill to be worthwhile. No, they'd need to save more people than would die without them. If it would be better to just struggle to breathe than have an amateur operator, that would be an argument against them.
Your credentials, whatever they are, haven't equipped you to clearly communicate your reasons for opposing this idea. As I mentioned, it seems like you actually support some version of it.
So in a hypothetical situation, where existing permanent healthcare infrastructure is at capacity, field hospitals are setup and existing medical professional staff need to be divided amongst the existing and newly supplemented infrastructure, what is your suggestion to save the most lives?
This exercise of sharing ideas, informing, critiquing is what this forum is for. Disagree and casting shame for a lack of first-hand professional experience is not educational and it’s not what this forum embodies.
I want to be as informed as possible so I can call BS when politicians say “nothing at all could have been done.”
So here's my idea: stop treating invasive medical procedures as something that can be trivially learned in a short amount of time. In short, drop the God complex. You're out of your depth here.
The need for action doesn't mean acting foolish. Irrational behavior in the name of "just doing something" will needlessly deplete more resources.
I am genuinely interested in what your suggestion would be though. This is me asking. What would you do to address in the hypothetical I proposed?
As I mentioned above, cross-training medical professionals in adjacent fields sounds more practical. Allowing nurses to do more of what the doctors typically do is another. Even just offloading some of the administrative paperwork for clinicians to admin staff might make a significant dent. Relaxing any bottle-neck non-essential bureaucratic requirements slowing down access to treatment or acquisition of new equipment and supplies.
Having said that, I also recognize that the ideas I just came up with in the last 30 seconds are just that: ideas off the top of my head, coming from someone with no actual experience in healthcare management.
Basically, my first priority would be to make an informed decision, and that starts with figuring out what I don't know, and filling in those gaps. Rather than uncritically insisting, quite emphatically, that medicine can be solved with a 30-day boot camp. Because, hey, if it worked for tech then it must work for medicine!
Perhaps you should take your own advice, rather than responding with personal vitriol directed at the users countering your point.
I'm still waiting for you to reply to the questions I asked in the thread that you kept trying to change the subject away from. When I wouldn't let you do that, and kept bringing you back on topic, you ran away because you'd painted yourself into a corner with glaring contradictions in the things you said, and there was no way you could resolve the contradictions except by admitting you didn't really mean what you said.
I'll share a piece of advice that a good friend of mine told me a few years ago: The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.
I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time, I thought it was just another one of those silly platitudes that people who've smoked a bit too much drugs say. But after pondering it over the years, it has become one of my very favorite sayings.
But if you're going to claim the contrary, I take it that you have a wealth of experience administering ventilation.
For the record, I've worked in fields tangential to medicine, including lab research for FDA trials and health tech. I may not be qualified to operate a ventilator, but I'm experienced enough to understand the technical skill gap between a non-invasive procedure and an invasive one. And ventilation falls into the latter category.
Of course he saw it, but he didn't like what he saw, so now he's pretending to have missed it on purpose, so repeating the facts he's ignoring won't make one bit of difference, and is just the two steps backwards he wants.
Notice how he always tries to repeat this same pattern in so many other postings, and don't reply to any of his attempts at trolling, except to explicitly point out what he's doing. And remember to flag him every time he does it, please!
Particularly my comment which seemed to spark something; it's a pretty basic fact that Ops Research people walk into situations where they aren't necessarily experts and optimise. That is a core part of the job. Every field is stuffed with experts who don't see how anyone could help them in their domain and they are generally wrong about the administrative trivia of organising a workplace. It doesn't even have anything to do with software. Ops Research is from mechanical engineering and factory optimisation.
I know bunch of doctors. I don't believe they work in an environment where the process has been mathematically optimised. They aren't mathematicians. That observation lines up very well with the "leave it to the experts" vibe of the responses here. They won't understand queuing theory for example.
Take a look at his history. The first most obvious thing you will notice is how well the moderation system is working: so many of his postings are deeply downvoted (light gray text), flagged, and dead. But unfortunately he's still succeeding in wasting a whole lot of the moderator's and readers' time.
If you can stand to wade through his light gray walls of rambling incoherent text, you will see there is a consistency to how he writes, digresses, derails, pretends concern, contradicts himself, and regularly trolls and sealions.
As Jacques put it, "It's the online version of passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top".
And when you try to pin him down on anything he actually believes, he retreats into his intellectual alt-right safe space, where it's impossible to truly know anything, and facts are a matter of opinion, since we live in a post truth society, and people all have their beliefs that they are entitled to, and everybody believes lies except for him, while nobody knows what he truly believes, but if you sincerely ask him, he derails and refuses to answer, and says you can't force him to answer your questions, because you're not the boss of him, and he's the victim.
Does that sound to you like the sincere conversation he claims he wants to have?
That means that somewhere between 1 and 5 people don't like what he says. It is so consistent I actually suspect that someone has it out for him; there doesn't seem to be a particular link between what he is saying and the colour of the text.
> Trolling by claiming to agree with people, and saying some things that happen to be right (while throwing much much more bullshit against the wall to see what sticks), and being insincerely and cloyingly polite, is still trolling, and classic sealioning behavior.
If a sealion happens to be right I'm on the side of the sealion. Facts matter.
And it is a very fair question - given the number of people who are potentially going to asphyxiate this year it is reasonable to ask and have explained what the issues are surrounding ventilators. I don't know the answer to it, for example.
This is why I'm saying that mistermann had a point - questions aren't assertions. It isn't reasonable to interpret a question as an assertion. There isn't any evidence here of people looking down on the (rather lofty!) skills of the medical profession.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKc_1gc1pLg
>"Ahem!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs7r5xfucPs
>"Well, this theory of yours certainly seems to have hit the nail on the head."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49H8HuqEcFo
>"Not necessarily. I could be arguing in my spare time."
It's uncanny.
There's actually a surprising amount of anti-intellectualism on HN, as evidenced by the persistent "People don't truly need a CS degree to be a qualified software developer; it's just gatekeeping." rhetoric one sees.
Do you know how to operate a ventilator? Why do you think that volunteers couldn't learn to do it?
Medicine has traditionally had a problem with a large number of very clever people who are sufficiently insulated from other communities that they are a bit behind the times. A good humourous example is the 1994 paper where a doctor will rediscover calculus.