Links
The challenge of corrosion and how engineers fight it (YouTube)
Arnold Kling claims that we over-consume medical services in the US
The lessons of Xanadu (on my personal blog)
Queries
Has anybody done serious, detailed work on the mechanisms that drive technological s-curves? (@Ben_Reinhardt)
Who are the smartest people working on battery storage? Best writing on the topic? (@juliadewahl)
What are examples of projects getting done really fast by organizations that are normally very slow? (@_brianpotter)
Is there a Thiel Fellowship type program for PhD candidates to bail out of academia? (@tayroga)
Tweets & retweets
“Appeal to nature” fallacies are ethically problematic for progress (thread by @RafaRuizdeLira)
US immigration as an important-but-not-urgent policy disaster (@sama)
The US basically stopped building large-scale water infrastructure in the 1980s (@_brianpotter)
The Kling article on medical care consumption focuses on the insurance side. We also have a regulations side.
The other day, I had a panic attack, and had to go to an urgent care clinic to get a prescription for propranolol, a generic anti hypertensive used off-label to control anxiety. I used the same dose I’ve used before, and all the doctor did was take my blood pressure and go through a couple 10-question anxiety screeners. The doctor’s visit, which was required but I didn’t need, cost $189 out of pocket. The pills cost $3. So the overconsumption is in some cases enforced.
I’ve had very similar experiences—I’ve become skeptical of any free-market medical system proposal, since you can’t freely choose for cost-optimality when the product is both necessary, heavily time-bound, and likely to be bought while in an impaired state of mind.
It depends completely on how you set up the market. Prediction-based Medicine would allow you to have a free market system that actually aligns the market incentives with health outcomes.