Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Re:Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by krebs_liebhaber on Thursday April 23, 2020 @01:56AM (#22953216)

I'm not sure if treating lots of minor maladies is a good idea. I'd think that there's a certain threshold of severity, below which treatment is riskier than just leaving it be, and that a lot of the "unsolved problems" you're talking about are things that don't meet that threshold.

One of the reasons the US spends so much on healthcare is that we have an ideology of "treatment at all costs"[0] when doing nothing is often the right solution.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/america...

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Re:Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by adrianN on Thursday April 23, 2020 @02:02AM (#22953238)

I don't know. There are minor maladies that don't need treatment because they get better on their own after some minor suffering, but there are a lot more minor maladies that over time only get worse. For example anything related to bad joints, or arteriosclerosis. Any effect of aging.

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Re:Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by jasonv on Thursday April 23, 2020 @08:22PM (#22963252)

I generally agree with you. But in the way that our defense budget is a significant portion of our federal budget, leaving many other state and federal needs un-fund-able, I'd suggest that there's a similar ratio of "elephant" medical research areas starving us of solutions to maladies that may be deserving of treatment.

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