> On January 17, 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had __cleared DermaSensor[0]__ as the first AI-powered medical device able to...
From [0] (emphasis my own)
> On Friday, the FDA authorized __for marketing__ the DermaSensor Inc. DermaSensor device. It is a prescription device, indicated for the evaluation of skin lesions suggestive of melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and/or squamous cell carcinoma in patients aged 40 and over to assist health care providers in determining whether to refer a patient to a dermatologist. __The device should be used in conjunction with the totality of clinically relevant information from the clinical assessment, including visual analysis of the lesion, by physicians who are not dermatologists.__ __The device should be used on lesions already assessed as suspicious for skin cancer and not as a screening tool.__ __The device ,,SHOULD NOT,, be used as the ,,sole,, diagnostic criterion nor to confirm a diagnosis of skin cancer.__ The FDA is requiring that the manufacturer conduct additional post-market clinical validation performance testing of the DermaSensor device in patients from demographic groups representative of the U.S. population, including populations who had limited representation of melanomas in the premarket studies, due to their having a relatively low incidence of the disease.
Even the product's website specifically says "clearer"[1]. And Reuter's article from 2 days ago[2]
@dang, I think this merits at minimum a title change but probably a link change. Current link is misleading and appears to be much more marketing focused.
I also thing the marketing release contradicts the terms of the cleared status by the FDA. The FDA specifically says this is not for screening or diagnosis. So essentially what does this device actually help with? A physician needs to be suspecting something abnormal with a lesion before using. If it is "negative" would a physician really want to trust a device in the off chance it misses a melanoma? If I were a family doctor and was suspicious of a lesion enough to use this device, wouldn't it make more sense to send to derm or just go ahead an biopsy?
It's not even that: it's a device for non-dermatologists, to decide if they need to make a referral. "Cleared" is definitely the right language here, this might only be a Class 1 medical device, it's not making any diagnostic claims.
Interesting idea. I have recently been reading John C. Bogle's work (of Vanguard fame) and he seems to be of the opinion, from my interpretation, that short term speculation will have disasterious consequences for the Stock Market and that we need a sort of Sin Tax to discourage such behavior. Your idea would track with that.
Not just the stock market. The short term thinking person induced by that has knock off issues all over the place, from environmental to healthcare to the physical harm of workers being pushed too hard in the name of short term profit.
Your comment reminded me about a discussion G.K Chesterton has in "Orthodoxy" on madness. My take is that when facts and information is divorced from experience we risk being unmoored from reality:
> If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst for it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but I think going forward critical thinking as well as an understanding of what to value is going to be important for future generations. Something that computers will never be good at doing is 'understanding' what is valuable in life since many times this cannot be measured. In essence, a healthy understanding of the three transcendentals the Good the True, and the Beautiful will be essential to keep our humanity. ChatGPT can perform many amazing skills but lacks the ability to accurately judge the value of what is it reporting. I think passing on a love for the transcendentals to our children is the only way to inoculate them from the firehose of 'junk' information ChatGP et al is about to unleash on the world.
For all of the old Microsoft's faults, they really did an excellent job with backwards compatibility. Now things are a mess and I fear that you are right. It really isn't the developers fault imo. OS really should be more stable.
I would argue because no charity was given to opinions contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the NIH declaired as truth. Perhaps most infamous is Dr. Collins asking for a takedown of the Great Berington declaration. The fact that so little was certain early on about COVID should have been a reason to allow physicians and scientists to discuss and debate policy without fear of having their careers destroyed. Now that we are further out from the pandemic cooler heads will prevail but I fear the damage to the reputation of the health authorities in the US will take a long time to recover.
Dr. Collins didn't ask for their careers to be destroyed. He asked for a rebuttal (or "take down of it's premises" in his words), which was easy because The Great Barrington Declaration was the most poorly devised policy proposal I had ever seen. I'm not surprised that Dr. Prasad pretends not to understand the difference.
It said that only nursing homes should be quarantined when the vast majority of elderly do not live in nursing homes. It encouraged everyone else to get infected as soon as possible, completely ignoring the fact that vaccines were being developed, which meant that later exposure would be far better than earlier exposure.
Vinay Prasad, MD (Heme/Onc) gives a very good rundown on why this trial is so important. He also points out why having accurate data for screening recommendations is so crucial. USPTF has been making recommendations recently without data to back up them up and get appropriately taken to task for that.
"He prefers iconoclastic approaches, whether by directly funding asteroid detection or advocating for nuclear power to combat global warming."
Ooh, scary dude. /s
Kids nowadays. I remember when nuclear power was a futuristic clean energy sort of ideal and when the way we figured out who was right and who was wrong on a complex topic was to let both sides openly debate and then pick who is more credible by how each is able to rally the facts in defense of their position.
Beware your society, which is doing the same thing to people like Kirsch that it did to Socrates two thousand years ago. The masses never change, apparently. All that changes is whether they're held in check or whether they're exploited by demagogues.
The title of this article reminded me of a thought provoking book by GK Chesterton, "The Everlasting Man", obviously he write from a religious perspective but one discussion raised a question that I had not considered before. Why do we assume primitive man was any less intelligent or artistic than we are now?
"Human civilization is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. [..] In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilization or the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness;" [1]
I love the thought of humanity being constant like that. Examples of things like prehistoric people drawing dicks on things, or "<name> was here" written on various ancient walls, all really emphasize that humans have been basically the same for a long time. "It was part of a fertility ritual" is one explanation, or another is that people have just always drawn dicks on things.
I had a debate in a computational intelligence course in grad school that veered off from the topic of embodied cognition somehow into the advance of human culture. (During class; no mind-altering substances included.)
The crux of the debate was, on one side, two of us saying there is no such thing as advancement in culture (art, music, taste, etc), only in science (knowledge) and technology (application); while the other side insisted that culture does indeed progress. It was an interesting debate. I still think that no culture is significantly more advanced culturally than any other probably going back many tens of thousands of years (or maybe ever? I don't know). Art or music or cuisine, etc, that invokes the intended emotional, cognitive, etc response is doing what it is supposed to do. Any preference to modern over ancient is purely subjective and nullified by any preference to ancient over modern.
I would therefore agree that modern humans are not more artistic.
However, as someone who studies intelligence, I would say that because of modern nutrition, medicine, evolution, and adaptation, modern humans are probably a tiny bit more intelligent than ancient humans. I would guess that someone alive 50,000 years ago who was transported to today and raised as a modern human would have little trouble, but that the average ancient human would probably be slightly less intelligent than the average modern human.
Hell, if the Flynn effect proves to be real, then the average grandparent may be slightly less intelligent than the average grandchild. Just in a couple generations. Over the course of dozens or hundreds of human generations, the difference would not be zero.
> However, as someone who studies intelligence, I would say that because of modern nutrition, medicine, evolution, and adaptation, modern humans are probably a tiny bit more intelligent than ancient humans. I would guess that someone alive 50,000 years ago who was transported to today and raised as a modern human would have little trouble, but that the average ancient human would probably be slightly less intelligent than the average modern human.
There's also the question of what we are actually measuring when we talk about "intelligence". It seems this is at least somewhat culturally subjective. This means that while you might be technically correct, people 50000 years ago might value aspects of intelligence that is slightly different, and they may excel in those aspects instead.
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In general, I don't know whether there can be any meaningful conclusion on whether "culture" advances. To me culture is always a matter of gaining a focus on one aspect and losing focus on another at the same time. I.e. a matter of preference and taste. Is there really something as "better" taste in general? Yes if you impose your subjective views onto to others, and no if you are fundamentally egalitarian or relativist. But then if you measure specifics (eg. how life-like/realistic were the paintings? How harmonious were the music?) you'll get some trends. The problem is that those trends aren't necessarily "improvement" if those aspects are subjectively considered a negative trait.
I'd add one argument about art: living in a "primitive" state full of unknowns promotes imagination a few orders of magnitude.
Another one: I make a parallel with pre-tooled humans that these people long ago were living on a thin line and had to be extremely lean and yet wildly efficient all the time, you don't have much time to craft a spear and it better be lethal when you finally approach a prey. And you do this with your hands. It looks as stupid as senior writing a few lines of code and looking dumb when it fact it's 80% right the first time.
I always said that the public health official must be absolutely certain they that all of the vaccines they were pushing are as safe and effective as they claimed before even considering mandating them. We now know they were wrong about at least one of them: the J&J vaccine is no longer being offered in my health system both because it's questionable safety profile and the fact that it is not as effective. Once we start preventing children from entering schools and removing people from their jobs (some with decades of experience) for not wanting to take a vaccine, the burden of proof is on the health officials to prove they are right. We also must remember that these measures have second order effects. I fear by abusing the trust the public had in physicians, public health officials have cause possibly permanent damage to the trust the average citizen has for the health community (this is especially pronounced among the underserved community).
a fast spreading pandemic vs. this or that public health measure.
the damage to the public health community is done not because of things like operation warpspeed, but because of the realpolitik of WHO, China, Trump, etc.
responsible participants have to take the time and effort to communicate with the correct framing: as new data comes in the best course of action can change, the current best is X, based on data D1, D2, ...
of course what ended up happening was random factoids sprinkled all over various media channels linked to local/state/federal/global decisions/recommendations.
government agencies are absolutely not up to the task of doing responsible communication to the public in this day and age.
Well, none delivered as promised. We went from "this will do it..." to "...get your booster boosted...and boosted..."
I get it. It's difficult to say. That's the true nature of science. The problem is, that level of honesty and transparency was completely abandoned. Instead we got "it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" which was yet another hyperbolic lie. Instead we got Fauci suggesting "wear two masks" instead of coming clean (i.e., those disposable masks didn't have any science to support their effectiveness. That is, they're useless*).
These are not opinions. These are facts. Yet we're in collective mass denial??
*Why didn't we already know this? And why isn't anyone asking why that was?
yes, but I think we need to start discussing what value college is actually bringing to society. Many of these majors do not contribute directly to wealth growth (but teach 'skills' such as critical thinking etc.) Higher education has no incentive to lower prices because they carry none of the risk if a student defaults. Even worse, there is no guarantee that students will be financially successful after graduation and they are still responsible for the debt if they are not successful. I don't blame students for being resentful but I think the resentment needs to be directed at the correct source of the problem: higher education, rather than blaming businesses for not paying enough money to pay off a 100K student loan debt. I think it is a tragedy that we live in a society where you are viewed as 'less than' if one does not go to college. This view takes advantage of our emotions and leads some to go to college without a plan and load up on debt without a clear plan on what they will do with their life. Just to be clear, some people should definitely go to college but the current situation kids being told practically from birth (my evidence is the popularity of 529 funds parents/grandparents set up) that they need to attend college is ridiculous.
Those 529 funds can be used for other forms of education, such as a trade school.
I think the biggest problem is credentialing. Employers want 4 year degrees for just about everything. Many careers/industries could probably switch to 2 year degrees and be fine. I'm sure there are a few that could just do a bootcamp.
All that sort of leads into the secondary problem of debt, with people not considering the cost differences of various schools due to bias, prestige, easy loans (like you mention), whatever. It's still possible to go to the state school I attended and end up with around $85k in debt. Not great, but much better than other schools where tuition alone would surpass that. I feel like this cost difference isn't covered enough in high school, and that students are making emotional decisions about where to go.
