Didn’t they though? I’m sure accounting firms hired way more accountants back in the days of paper records. AI definitely won’t rid society of the developer role, but there will certainly be fewer employment opportunities.
There is already fewer employment opportunities, because big tech firms hired anyone they could and let them sit on unimportant things. At this moment, AI is used mostly as a convenient excuse to "trim the fat". Of course, it's a catastrophe for those fired programmers, but the good ones will find a job or create a new one.
So how long is the trip to Earth from your home planet? And do you plan on staying a while or are you just here for 6 months to humiliate us with your superintelligence?
If I let playing the lottery change how I interact with the world/prevent me from dealing with my situation, because I hope I will win, that 'hope' is a negative impact on my life.
If I encourage my friend who is down on their luck to buy lottery tickets so they can have hope, am I helping them, am I being kind?
"Hope is false if it is based on ignorance of the correct assessment of the probability that a desire is fulfilled or on ignorance with regard to the desirability of the object of desire. Hope is justified—realistic—when the hoping person knows and accepts experts’ judgement about the probability of hope fulfillment. However, I argued, what matters for evaluating a person’s hope is not only whether it is realistic, but also whether it is reasonable in light of the aim and goals for which the person strives in (the remainder of) his life
...a person’s hope that an (experimental) treatment may prolong his or her life or improve the quality of his or her life can only be called false when he or she thinks that the chances of personal benefits are greater than those estimated by experts. If he or she does accept their judgement, continuing to hope is realistic. Hope is moreover reasonable if it contributes to realizing what a person strives for in (the remainder of) his life" [1].
I agree that the probability of a desired outcome is valuable information. But to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language. Hope is hope. It’s quite proven that believing a certain outcome is likely increases the likelihood of that outcome.
> to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language
False hope is still a form of hope in the same way a red car is still a car.
And it’s useful to delineate it. Hope is rooted in expectation. When we watch a film about a fraudster, the dramatic irony arises from the audience knowing the rube is being played even while the rube is quite hopeful. We may conclude it’s better for the victim to live in false hope. But again, it’s useful to understand it’s a hope that’s false (and that someone is making that decision for them).
Hope is premised on the basis that nobody knows the future 100%.
Experts can give a mostly-frequentist analysis based on past medical cases.
The unknown part is whether those cases apply to yours.
And nobody knows.
All the so-called probability is meaningless. It matters not whether your chances of remission is "99%" or "1%". Those numbers are meaningless in a specific case under a specific situation.
I understand this is not the commonly understood notion of probability, but the common notion is simply wrong.
I'm not saying experts are wrong, I'm happy to assume that their analyses are quite correct when applied to a population. I'm just saying the common way of interpreting their statistics onto one specific case (the one you care about) is wrong, because you can't just plug the probability onto a single person/case and round it off to zero or one.
OP is asking for lesser-known possible treatments/trials/diets/whatever for a friend who is probably weeks to months from death. And your contribution is to stop people from helping them because of something about what now?
> And your contribution is to stop people from helping them
No. In the vast majority of cases, answering this question as intended isn't helping them, it's actively harming them.
> because of something about what now
You're responding to a post which explains this. If you understood the post, faking confusion is dishonest. If you didn't understand the post, you weren't qualified to disagree with it.
This removes so much agency from the people involved. If I were dying of cancer and asked for "out there" solutions, I wouldn't want people hand-wringing about whether it's morally ok to share unconfirmed theories.
Gimme everything you got at all levels of certainty, and let me decide what I want to try and not try. If I decide I don't want to try anything, or none of the suggestions have enough evidence to be worth trying and I'd rather travel around the world and skydive with my wife the last few months, that's ok too!
But none of us can pretend to know what they're actually going through, we can only offer what it asked and let them decide.
> This removes so much agency from the people involved.
No. Filling people's minds with garbage non-information does not empower them. Knowledge is power. Random bullshit ideas isn't.
> If I were dying of cancer and asked for "out there" solutions,
OP isn't dying of cancer, and as far as I can tell, their friend who is dying of cancer did not ask for solutions of any kind.
You're trying to appeal to empathy here, but as far as I can tell, the person you're asking me to empathize with doesn't exist. There is no person dying of cancer asking for Hacker News' unqualified medical advice that I'm aware of.
The vast majority of people do not share the "move fast and break things" mentality--this is actually one of the main reasons people dislike corporate culture. This is especially true with medicine. Leave the poor cancer patient alone.
> Gimme everything you got at all levels of certainty, and let me decide what I want to try and not try. If I decide I don't want to try anything, or none of the suggestions have enough evidence to be worth trying and I'd rather travel around the world and skydive with my wife the last few months, that's ok too!
Agency isn't that easy. There are myriads of advertisers and propagandists out there trying to spin a narrative, and a lot of the hare-brained ideas out there exist because someone is trying to manipulate you--to buy a product, vote for a person, etc. These people are good at what they do, and even if you catch on to a few of them and dodge their bad ideas, a lot of them are going to worm into your brain and get you to do something they want you to do. Let me reitrate: what they want you to do, not what you, at a fundamental level, want to do. That's not agency, that's you being manipulated.
There is not a shortage of information, there is a shortage of effective filters of information that separate out the truth. Humans simply are not capable of sifting through all the garbage ideas out there, and that includes you (and me!). If you open yourself up to the full stream of garbage ideas, that doesn't give you agency, that gives your agency away to the advertiser or propagandist who happens to trigger your biases most effectively. You're not doing what you want, you're doing what they've manipulated you to want.
> But none of us can pretend to know what they're actually going through, we can only offer what it asked and let them decide.
Believe it or not, OP is not the only person to have a friend dying of cancer.
A friend of mine in college was diagnosed with lymphoma late in his sophomore year and died about a year after graduation. In his last years he became increasingly hostile to the well-intentioned people who kept offering genuinely stupid ideas for how he could cure his cancer. It isn't fun for cancer patients to have to politely listen to this particularly unhealthy way of coping with their death while they are trying to cope with their own death.
Reading other accounts of people with cancer, this is a pretty common complaint.
> Knowledge is power. Random bullshit ideas isn't.
Every proven idea started as a random bullshit idea. No one in this thread is presenting their ideas as definitive solutions as far as I see, everyone is being pretty good about providing their confidence levels and sources.
> what they want you to do, not what you, at a fundamental level, want to do
This is a whole philosophical rabbit hole about advertising and free will in general, it's not specific to OP's case so I don't really want to get into it, that discussion is better had on Reddit or some other HN thread.
> Every proven idea started as a random bullshit idea.
No, actually, almost no proven ideas start this way. Ideas which ultimately solve problems in a complex field, generally require a great deal of expertise to discover. Penicillin was discovered by doctors, insulin was discovered by doctors.
We all love the myth of an outsider who revolutionizes a field they were excluded from, but the reality is that someone like Florence Nightingale was excluded from medicine because of her gender, not because of her lack of subject expertise. The people who make groundbreaking discoveries in a field are almost universally experts in that field.
Sure, maybe in some new field that's in its infancy, a random person has a chance of discovering something useful, but oncology isn't that--we've got centuries of study of cancers.
Really? Let's look:
> No one in this thread is presenting their ideas as definitive solutions as far as I see, everyone is being pretty good about providing their confidence levels and sources.
Really? Let's take a look:
1. "Meanwhile, it is proven that the Zika virus does kill GBM cells in humans. This is what causes microcephaly in newborns. Inoculating the Zika virus in a controlled environment yields zero risk, and has no side effects." Poster gives sources, but the sources don't say what he claims they say, because you know, randos of the internet aren't actually capable of reading medical studies.
2. "To give you the short version of the story about how it works for HER: taking bloodroot causes the cancer to shrink too small to take a biopsy, but not go into remission, and when she stops taking it per the doctors advice, it gets very large and they start talking about surgery." Seems pretty confident that there's a causal relationship between the remission and his mom poisoning herself. Luckily another poster posted this: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/07/29/more-isnt-always-better-d...
3. "Have you looked into ivermectin and fenbendazole?" Later, when criticized, user posts: "The linked study claims it has potential." User provides two linked studies. Both links DO NOT claim it has potential, because, you know, randos on the internet are not capable of reading medical studies.
Let me be clear: the confidence level of a non-oncologist in an oncological solution is worth about as much as what I flushed down the toilet this morning. These aren't confidence levels, they're arrogance levels of people thinking they know things they don't. And contrary to your claim, there are a lot of pretty "confident" people posting here about things they should have a great deal less confidence about.
> As for the rest, I think this other commenter said it better than I can:
> I'm not sure why all the hate.
The hate has been thoroughly explained, but your linked poster isn't any more capable of reading Hacker News posts than they are of reading medical journals, apparently.
Or maybe not, because it looks really bad compared to other, more or less state of the art engines. The most remarkable thing about Teardown is its physics, not its graphics.
I created a free to use little tool for quickly generating test data that contains correct foreign key relationships.
I’d love some feedback!