Being a doctor (i.e., general practitioner) is a job that is less cognitively loaded and carries less responsibility than the job of a car mechanic.
General practitioners are simply running off standard checklists for standard ailments. It's no different from reading a car repair manual.
And unlike car mechanics, you probably won't succeed in suing your doctor if he used the wrong checklist and got you injured by mistake.
P.S. Being a doctor in a more complex specialty is not much different, but then you're expected to read literature and keep up with current science research. It's still fundamentally checklist-based, but at least there's an expectation that the checklists are being updated.
>General practitioners are simply running off standard checklists for standard ailments. It's no different from reading a car repair manual.
They also have 8+ years of training to "run those lists", know better what to suggest when something is not on the list, can see things the person haven't noticed themselves, and so on -- not to mention that they have more intelligence (to get through med school and all) than the average citizen...
Even the fact that we're seriously having this discussion proves their necessity.
That's how you end up with homeopathy and anti-vaccines, because "what do doctors know anyway"...
(And I'm all for being suspicious of the pharma corporations, medical industry for their profit-driven motives, but "a GP just runs a list so do it yourself off of the internet" is a no-go).
This is wrong is wrong in so many levels. Sure, you can fit the whole universe knowledge in a checklist.
Doctors can see much more than a normal person, by just looking at your face. A bright person would possibly take 8+ years to have a beginner ability on this. Just as I can in 5 minutes grasp the quality of a codebase better than a beginner.
I can give you the guitar tabs for Cliff of Dover. Can you follow the instructions?
> Why? It's not rocket science, and it's not like this is a complex decision that you couldn't adequately make after 15 of Internet searching.
If you've got a tonsillitis (one of the most common reasons for getting antibiotics), how to you find out whether it's the bacterial or the viral type?
It's for the same reason dynamite is not sold wholesale in the hardware store.
A lot of times it will be harmless, but every once in a while some Billy or Jane will dose themselves just right to train their infection to get over the antibiotics they bought, it will happen to be highly contagious,and then suddenly you've got an epidemy in your hands.
> Internet searching.
Replacing visiting a real doctor with internet searches is like replacing a plane pilot with internet searches.
Antibiotic abuse is a real problem, but expecting doctors to fix or even understand it is like expecting car mechanics to make traffic laws for your country.
Antibiotics should be regulated by a serious government effort, not by doctors.
What makes you say that? That's like expecting software engineers to understand the implications of clock synchronization in your server CPU. Sure, it'd be nice if employees had that level of dedication, but who are we kidding? That's not what they are being paid for.
> Such government effort can only be successful if it involves lots of doctors.
Well, no. Doctors aren't the ones making epidemiology science research. At best they might read a paper or two if somebody pushes them.
Do you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?
Internet is a tool to communicate freely and regardless of the message.
Internet isn't "people". If someone harass you with your phone, you don't blame the phone, you blame the harasser. The phone is fine.
The same way journalist and activist are protected.
Should you blame the mailman if he deliver some harassing anonymous letter ? The physical mail offer the same sort of protection if it's done properly.
If someone harassed me with anonymous letters, I would open a police report. The point is that no equivalent recourse exists online.
Edit: The point being that the mailman is a red herring. If the internet is really an extension of public space as (presumably) claimed, let's treat it like one.
I m no expert in that field. Probably better than you think since the police has access to a lot of tools to find you and been an harasser doesn't mean you have the technical skill to be anonymous enougth.
We are now in an endless debate. Internet isn't the problem. Bad behaviours, uneducation, missinformation, fake news, etc are the problem.
Blaming internet won't solve those. And they will be ready for the next tool.
How would it change anything if the harasser did it in the real world? Online there are logs of it, in the real world it'll be you word against theirs.
I am not suggesting that harassment ceases to exist in the real world, I'm saying that it's simply not so cut-and-dry as the parent's comment suggests. An individual's behavior can drastically alter between the physical and virtual world, where social norms and filters can easily be tossed aside.
A true non-discriminatory environment is also an environment of no mercy. All opinions are permitted, even ones you will find incredibly vile and threatening.
So think carefully when you ask for this kind of environment. I think what some people are actually asking for when they say "non-discriminatory" is an environment where people who do not accept minority members or opinions are not welcomed.
Ejecting people for making rape and death threats to other members of the community is not the same as ejecting members of the community for being PoC, LGBTQ, Nazis or Republicans.
Yeah but it is a "anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human" thing. It says nothing of worthiness and everything about possibilities because worthiness is ultimately a matter of opinion.
It is like asking for bullets which only hurt guilty people whom it would be necessary to shoot.
The distinction being action taken towards other members on the one hand (the making of threats) and convictions (being PoC, LGBTQ, Nazi) on the other hand?
What about convictions that compel action (Jihadis, Jehovas, militant atheists, Nazis) it might serve to eject people of those convictions because it should be expected they take those actions.
> I always got the feeling that java was c++ with a bit more religion about OO
No way. C++ was always much more into the functional programming paradigm. (See the STL, for example.)
The connection between C++ and OOP is because OOP was the insane hype at the time when C++ was being invented. The OOP lipservice was mandatory in order to be taken seriously by the fashion-driven programming industry, but real C++ programmers always looked down on OOP and considered it a code smell and crutch.
> The connection between C++ and OOP is because OOP was the insane hype at the time when C++ was being invented.
Not really, the C++ OOP features were directly modeled after very similar features in Simula. C++ was specifically designed as a way of bringing these sorts of features to C, although it did include other improvements to the language as well. Templates and the STL as we know it were a relatively late addition to the language.
It's also worth mentioning that there's only a handful of things about OOP that could be genuinely considered "a code smell"; in fact you could restrict that concern to one feature, viz. implementation inheritance. Object-based programming which follows the "composition over inheritance" guideline can still broadly tap into the improved-modularity benefits that 'objects' are generally known for.
> C++ was always much more into the functional programming paradigm. (See the STL, for example.)
Always? The STL was a last-minute addition to the standard library before C++98. Just a few years before, template implementations in compilers were buggy. There's a reason Qt has its own containers: because it's that old.
> The connection between C++ and OOP is because OOP was the insane hype at the time when C++ was being invented
No, it was because Bjarne wanted features from Simula whilst still generating fast code.
> real C++ programmers always looked down on OOP and considered it a code smell and crutch.
Absolutely not. Again, look at Qt. Look at CERN's ROOT. Java looks a lot like it does because that's how C++ code was written at the time. Even in the early 2000s I was getting funny looks from people when I told them to default to putting variables on the stack.
Managing for whom? Is that a resource optimization problem? What if I use a control monad that does the same thing? If TF finds the shortest path for a computation does that make it an OS according to your definition ?
JSON and SQL are closer to preimages of data and computation manifolds respectively that are projected (or fibrated) via Kan
PHP may be memory safe but the shitload of poorly written C extensions enabled by default on all hosts that shipped with the distribution from 1995 to 2010 sure as hell weren't.
Nobody is upset, really. Java web client lost a very long time ago to Flash.
But imagine, if 25 years ago you poured your heart and soul years ago into a project because it promised to be a particular kind of great (but later failed), it can sort of drive the knife deeper and throw extra salt in the wound when your project's ugly red-headed stepchild (i.e. JavaScript) grows up into something great and gives birth years later to a beautiful standard (asm.js, later WebAssembly) that becomes what your project thought it would be, and much more. Or something like that.
Java certainly has a well-established place in software, no doubt about that. But its original promises had it (combined with AWT/Swing, applets, and XML, ... umm yeah) becoming the ultimate "write once run everywhere" platform that could scale up to massive servers and down to tiny embedded chips, and every client platform in between. In retrospect, C# and .NET would have done well not to attempt to emulate Java's initial scope.
> It's all about sales and marketing and, eventually, politics.
Not in this case. Java failed because it sucked from a technical point of view. It traded better 'OO purity' in exchange for worse security, portability and performance.
The end result is that users got something that was slower and buggier for no gain.
I'm not so sure it failed. I use IntelliJ IDEA daily, people in my office use WebStorm for Javascript development. There are Swing applications out there that people use, admittedly the ones I've seen are mostly business software. And of course all Android applications are leveraging Java.
It's argued that only IDEs use Java, but Java + Swing strikes me as the most popular cross-platform language and toolkit currently in use.
Java didn't succeed in terms of running code in a web page but it has been wildly successful in regards to "write once, run everywhere". It is widely deployed and has been successful isolating code specific to a particular OS or platform.
While it's clear that Javascript has been successful in the "run code in a web page" sense, it's primary deployment target remains the web browser; even when it's marketed as a cross-platform solution it's often targeting something like Electron.
WebAssembly has its work cut out for it trying to succeed in both of these spaces. I think the project might enhance it's chances for success by remembering Java and its browser plugin rather than pretending they are the first.
Why? It's not rocket science, and it's not like this is a complex decision that you couldn't adequately make after 15 of Internet searching.
The fake mystique imparted on general practitioner doctors is a toxic force for bad in the world.
> Doctors shouldn't be prescribing antibiotics unless there is a big real need.
The doctor doesn't know if there is a "big real need", and in fact cannot.
The doctor is just running off a standard checklist for one of among 50 almost exactly alike cases during his workday.