Doctor might not be the best example. There are tons of Facebook groups out there treating all their diseases with crystals and a bit of WebMD. Had to sit an extra 20 minutes at the dentist just this week because some lady refused the XRay and was lecturing the staff and then the dentist about how they should be able to figure out her problem with just their eyes.
It's also a bad example because most doctors people encounter are overworked, on a budget, and not very smart,* which means they're very frequently wrong.
Assuming the patient is as intelligent as the average on HN, and motivated about their health, they may well be able to learn more about what's going on with their health in the month it takes to get an appointment than the doctor will in the ten minutes they spend with you.
(* Because most people who live in cities, and most people who go into primary care in cities do so because they weren't competitive enough for one of the more interesting and lucrative specialties. It's a similar dynamic as to why most people in the tech industry that people encounter—IT help desk reps—are not usually the cream of the crop.)
This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer research center because he put more value on helping to cure cancer than making more money. There actually are people out there who value service to the community more than fame or fortune. They deserve praise, not scorn.
It isn't an insult to anyone. I very clearly said "most" and "usually." We also have excellent IT support, done by developers, because we specifically negotiated for it. They are excellent. But we specifically included that in the contract because it is an inarguable, objective fact that most IT help desk support is not staffed with the most skilled people in the tech industry.
Unfortunately, the kind of sacrifice and selflessness you describe is not the norm in our society. As a result, the dynamic I articulated holds for "most"—just like I said.
Your post is deliberately dishonest in its characterization of what I said, and excessively hostile. That kind of behavior is not consistent with the community norms on HN. I urge you to reconsider how you interact with people here.
This isn’t a good analogy imo, and I’d argue that it’s often healthy for someone to push back this way.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence as a customer and a developer, and have at times had to straddle the fence as a PM.
The hardness of a problem does not mean the problem can’t or doesn’t need to be solved.
A client pushing back is often their way of trying to ensure that the developer actually understands what they want.
“Pushing back” as a developer is often mostly about setting expectations, i.e. “no, this is very different, won’t benefit from previous work and won’t be easy”.
All of this is necessary to gain a shared understanding, and the end result may still be that the work must be done.
IMO, the "can't you just" people do this with everyone. I can understand why, as it is sometimes effective at queuing people to keep trying and to find a way.
Unfortunately, the part after the "can't you just" is rarely helpful.
If I'm to believe a friend, who'se a family doctor, this is exactly what happens.
Especially since corona. And not a tiny minority, but a big group.
He told me that a few decades ago, there were the occasional homeopathic or other "nutcases". But that today this is common.
What I've read about this, it's a global trend, in a fly-wheel (feedback-loop) effect with mostly populism. Populism feeds distrust in authorities like lawyers, doctors, journalists. And distrust in authorities feeds populism.
There are good doctors and bad doctors just like any other profession. I have gotten plenty of bad advice over the years from doctors. Took me 2 years of going to various doctors to figure out I was having a reaction to mold. My neurologist just had me try all these different medicines, almost all made me worse, but none of them got to the actual problem. This is VERY common. Doctors so often just treat symptoms. That said, there are idiots out there that don't listen to anything a doctor says about politically charged issues like Covid. Homeopathy is mostly nuts. But integrative medicine is also often poo-pooed, but it makes logical sense to treat the whole person, not just symptoms. But I am sure there are plenty of crackpots there too. The waters are muddy my friend, not much is clear.
Yes, i feel like the biggest problems getting real treatment are in equal parts, people not thinking of the concomitant factor/asking the right things/being afraid to tell certain things, and doctors having no where near enough time to actually listen to someone and think about their situation.
I try not to fall into the first category but I've known many people who do. Though I've had many experiences with fast talking, eyes glazed, interrupt me to push the first thing that comes to mind type doctors. Once i had to fight with guy to just get him to let me finish a sentence! He changed his mind every 5 words trying to get out of there but it'd've been faster if he just let me talk! It's infuriating, I'll never go back to a doctor like that. Seems like he didn't even wait to leave the room before i was out of his mind, possibly i never even entered it
I suffered insomnia for many years when working days, it seems I'm just a night owl and I've learned that working the night shift works best for me, midnight - 8am local time seems to be the sweet spot for me, in bed before noon, up for a late dinner and a night with family before they're all off to sleep while I work the night away in peaceful quiet... and no more insomnia, with black-out curtains in the bedroom and a running fan I no longer have trouble sleeping...
This document is actually pretty innovative in that it actually sets out a bunch of "legal remedies" for several situations and claims a right of violence by the state. In Medieval Europe, disputes were still legally settled via feud or vendetta until the 16th century. Even duels were still practiced centuries later.
seeing some genocidal tendencies in the current world, I sometimes think that maybe, just maybe ancient laws were not dictating the minimal possible punishment, but actually limited it. Like "Kill only you, not all your family". or "Take an eye for an eye, but just an eye, and you'll live"
Keep in mind this law code was likely designed to combat intergenerational grudges between clans, which are extremely brutal (look up the "Hatfield-McCoy feud")
Without extremely harsh punishments, the clans likely would not have been willing to adopt any new code.
You'd think that with the relatively smaller populations of the past, they'd want to preserve manpower and not execute people willy-nilly.
Or were these laws, as most today, just an excuse to consolidate wealth and power from the executed "convicts" into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful?
Very trigger-happy laws are often not intended to be implemented exactly as written. If you have done something against a family that the law says you should be executed for, you can probably purchase your life from them. Same goes for all the eye-for-an-eye punishments.
A very different time and place, but in early medieval Iceland if you poked out someone's eye, that someone now owns your corresponding eye. Then you can together come to terms on whether the eye should be also poked or if you can agree on a price to buy it back.
A more statist example, at times in ancient China the law code had execution as punishment on basically every crime that the state got involved in at all. But most of the condemned were not executed, but eventually had their sentence commuted to internal exile (into some other part of China).
I've read that also in medieval Finland crimes that were punishable by death rarely resulted in actual execution. Fines and other less harsh punishments were preferred, probably because that way the criminal could still remain a contributing member of the community. Makes sense considering how small the communities were back then in these parts of the world.
Pre-birth control, there were usually more mouths to feed than food to feed them.
Modern machines and energy allow things to scale and be decoupled from human productivity enough it’s easy to forget - but it used to be, a hand not helping make food and helping it’s neighbors, was a hand hurting them. In real, concrete ways.
Back then, no one had the infrastructure or wealth to deal with putting a bunch of assholes in cages and feeding them regularly until they ‘behaved’. Usually anyway.
Hell, unless the cages were intentionally horrific, that would often be a step up on most folks day to day living conditions anyway.
So make an example, and make it a spectacle - and cheap. Hard to beat an execution on that front!
Those were times where premature deaths were extremely common and natural. This probably manifested a much reduced fear and intolerance of killing, as against today where murder is a very rare phenomenon and results in long-term trauma across all people who were even remotely involved.
Surplus of labour is entirely possible in agrarian society. Later in Europe there were periods when there was more labour than there was land. In situation like that losing some is not as big deal. Also "state" did not invest in their citizenry. So they did not lose anything by losing people.
I often tell my wife my software job is like being a home builder, people think they know what they want, but it's not until they're standing in the thing trying to use it that they figure out what parts work and don't work well for what they actually need... and I spend quite a bit of iterating before we end up with the final working thing -- which is usually far removed from the initial design.
