You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.
This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.
If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.
The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.
MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.
... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.
Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match.
Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb!
The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.
Take PSA, since it's a simpler example. You're right that, if we screen everyone, taking action based on the outcome causes more harm than good. The response is to calibrate... which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
With the MRI, you don't get back simple dichotomous things, but you get back potential indications. That can be scary - talk about calibration all you want, but if patients see things and start thinking about the big C word there are likely to be a lot of unnecessary biopsies.
The bottom line is that it's possible to imagine a benefit, but it is not reasonable to pretend it's as simple as "just re-calibrate your interpretation of the results!". There's a reason that a lot of thought goes into when to do screening.
> which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
This just isn't true. In practice any such screening model can ALWAYS improve with more data—basically because the statistical power goes up and up—up to an asymptote set by noise in the physical process itself.
> That can be scary
Handling that is the job of professionals, is now and will continue to be.
It is extremely reasonable to imagine a benefit! What is doubtful is imagining there wouldn't be one!
I find the line of reasoning in this whole anti-MRI-everyone argument to be bewildering. I think it is basically an emotional argument, which has set in as "established truth" by repetition; people will trot it out by instinct whenever they encounter any situation that suggests it. It reflects lessons collectively learned from the history of medicine, its over-estimation of its own abilities and its overfitting to data, and its ever-increasing sensitivity to liability.
But it is not inherently true—it is really a statement about poor statistical and policy practices in the field, which could be rectified with concerted effort, with a potential for great public upside.
Not that any of this matters at the current price point. But, on a brief investigation, the amortized cost of a single MRI scan is ~$500-800—perhaps 1/5 what I would have guessed!
I've heard many horror stories of bank/brokerage accounts being frozen despite all deposits being legitimate, not to mention not being able to transfer large amounts or not even being allowed to open an account.
Meanwhile crooks somehow manage to have bank accounts in all the big banks without issues.
Is there? They are already a few rungs up from illegal criminals. Not much further to get to anyone since these are approved visa holders. Im just waiting for them to declare all Californians as non-citizens at this point.
Here are some thoughts from a U.S. citizen whose wife is an immigrant.
I have spent more than two and a half years filing forms and preparing paperwork for the U.S. government. I handled everything myself, without any “special” help or legal advice. I simply downloaded the forms from USCIS, filled them out using the required information, and submitted them.
What I can tell you is this: there is a massive market in the United States built on gray-area schemes, semi-legal shortcuts, and so-called expert advice. For example, there are companies charging $30,000 to submit a form that costs only $745 to file. Many “helpers” sell visa “upgrades.” The idea is that you arrive on a tourist visa and then follow a specific sequence of steps to convert it into a green card - something packaged and sold as a premium service for an extraordinary price.
This is a very large and lucrative slice of the pie that most people know little about. Both the U.S. visa process and tax filing system are riddled with gray practices and questionable “solutions.” Too often, the end result is that people are told to outright lie about their visa status or their taxes because they were instructed to do so.
From what I have observed, I would not call these practices outright foolish. Overblown at times? Yes, perhaps. But unnecessary? Not really.
Every single person on the planet has broken some rule or another. If they want to kick all visa holders out they might as well do it without all the pretense (and save a bunch of money in the process).
At this point it seems they are trying to drag everyone through the mud so individuals have to waste all their personal time and capital fighting a deep pocketed state.
Also visas expire, so why not simply implement better checks for new visas. Most of the 55M visas are probably fine, so you have to spend an exorbitant amount of resource on finding very few issues. It's much cheaper to add additional check to new visa applications.
55M is also just a crazy amount of visas for a country with 350M citizens. Especially given that I'd guess that a large amount of people travel to the US on a visa waive program.
Why can't they retain stories like Dredd, The Minority Report and Continuum as fiction? They were supposed to be warnings, not user manuals. Something being possible doesn't always mean that it's a good idea.
PS: This rather useless comment is actually an expression of frustration. We are a population of more than 8 billion. Why are such concepts even tolerated?
Yes, literally the first thing I thought of was "oh, another government LLM use case." Exactly the same crap doge was doing.
Whatever contractor is working on this is probably salivating at the opportunity to refine capabilities. I still think at some point this is going to be used to field questions like "ok, show me the top 10 citizens in this area who regularly engage in X online behavior."
> Who here would be happy if you invited a guest into your house and they ignored your customs like no shoes in the house or clean up after yourself.
It would be very reasonable to be unhappy about that, for sure. However, it's also reasonable to be unhappy when my neighbor kicks me out of their house for not taking off my shoes rather than reminding me to take them off. I'd probably stop visiting that neighbor, especially if the other people in my neighborhood could tell me similar stories.
As someone else already pointed out, it's rather easy to find one law or the other that any particular person has broken - that's a fundamental problem with laws everywhere. So what you suggest is rather impractical when the regime is on a mission to find at least one for every 'guest'. But okay, your country your rules. But there is a catch. If you insist on treating every guest as a criminal to be confirmed, to be marched out like animals on chains without any due process for them to defend their reputation, then get ready to be treated as the ghetto of the world. That's a consequence of every guest and every country expecting to be treated with dignity. That's one thing you cannot control and practically the entire rest of the world is in the other camp.
I'm sure you're confident about the ability of your citizens to hold up the nation without any help. I'm not going to argue. I admire all societies and cultures for their unique abilities and achievements. But you would be worried if you knew how much these 'guests' contributed to your nation's greatness across time and across every strata of your society. They built everything from your earliest railroads to your biggest rockets. They man your remotest farms to the top echelons of your administration. You'd be underestimating their importance to your welfare at your own peril.
But forget the guests. I'm worried about you people too. Nations treat the visas they issue and even asylum requests with great respect. The guests are given almost all the protections as citizens - only the right to influence the governance is denied. But that situation has changed rapidly recently. Not only are the legal guests being abused, the treatment is gradually being extended to legal citizens, with the attempts to cancel birthright and naturalized citizenship. Two measures are extremely concerning - many of the deported immigrants had no criminal records anywhere. And citizens like the 4 year old cancer patient were deported by putting their immigrant parents in an impossible situation. At this rate, how long till they start applying it to citizens like you? Never forget what someone said about 'home growns'. Clearly, your conduct is not what defines your standing. Are you sure you're on the right side in this regime's eyes?
I could taunt you for your confidence, which I wouldn't hold in the same situation. But I don't enjoy anyone's pain or misery. That pain and misery won't be as bad as what others had to suffer due to the cruelty of some of your leaders - like shell-shocked orphans wandering aimlessly in the streets or mothers wailing inconsolably over the graves of their toddler children. But pain is still pain. And I'm worried. Just prepare for whatever is coming and hunker down. No one's future is guaranteed, including mine. So, good luck for now. I hope to continue this conversation on the other side.
Because enough people clicked the flag link. If enough of them click the flag link on this one, it'll get flagged too!
Flagging is there for stuff that's off-topic or generating low-quality discussion in the views of the people clicking the flag link. Sometimes the admins will step in to unflag the article if it looks like neither of these apply, and/or if it would be helpful to have a containment topic for discussion of a particularly popular contentious topic.
Tautology isn't a useful reply to this question. At best it's a distraction, and at worst deflection. That people clicked the flagged link is already apparent by virtue of the post having been marked as flagged. That doesn't engage with why it was flagged.
I disagree, but maybe if I elaborate (as perhaps I should have done) it'll be clearer. The comment was intended to make two points:
0. the link was clicked by users of the site. The admins claim not to have any influence; I'm sure they do (if they want), but they seem to often enough rescue discussions from the flagged set that we can assume the readership exercises significant influence and there's no shadowy cabal generally trying to suppress wrongthink, as some seem to suppose. (Of course, perhaps there are a lot of people in the readership that are, and maybe they collude, but that is true for everything, and a far less interesting point)
1. if you want to know why the article was flagged, you will have to individually ask the people that flagged it. Sure, if you post the question here, it stands a non-zero chance of attracting the odd comment from these people, but it's quite obviously an inefficient way of finding out. What better ways are there? Well... none, really. But that means the answer is essentially unknowable, and the question barely worth asking.
So with the question barely worth asking - why ask it? It's just a sure-fire way to attract low-quality speculation, that will almost certainly blame it on: well, take your pick! - in some unproductive fashion, probably engendering some ongoing predictable discussion about the current bugbears of cranks of whatever stripe end up joining in.
(Or, suppose the question is posed by somebody unsure how the flag mechanism works: I think my reply actually does cover this case well enough.)
Vile.
You know why we don't give everyone a full body MRI every year? Too many false positives, too many benign findings that result in unnecessary action, too expensive.
This is the same. It's going to have errors, it's going to find benign things, and it's going to be expensive. It's going to hurt people who fundamentally did nothing wrong.
If it's expensive and hurting innocent people, it sure looks like cruelty is the point.
The MRI analogy is not good. The false positive risk is only against the present-day distribution of MRIs mostly taken of symptomatic patients; if we had the dataset of "annual MRIs for everyone" we would very quickly recalibrate our sensitivity to the new baseline.
MRIs produce shadows that are indistinguishable from cysts or tumors all the time. They are benign, but no amount of data will reduce them. And telling someone "you have a shadow here, it's probably benign" makes people anxious and they go, "maybe I should boost it?" Which is needlessly invasive.
huh, well, if it's true that "no amount of data will reduce them" then my point is wrong, but I highly doubt that's true.
The data is often a biopsy, which is invasive and potentially harmful.
False positives are still false positives. You don't decide to ignore a possible tumor because everybody's getting MRIs these days.
... yeah? You'd expect the false positive rate to be HIGHER when you're not looking at an enriched patient subset. That's why we're careful about recommending certain kinds of screening. See also: PSA screening.
Well, you missed my point. I'm not talking about "you look at the MRI and see something and say it's a positive", I'm referring to the process of reading MRIs as like a statistical model (even if in practice it exists in the minds of radiologists) which is trained on the corpus of MRI data. That model will depend in some way on the distribution of positive/negative examples in the corpus; if the corpus changes the model has to then be updated to match.
Point is, the false positive concern is only a concern if you use the old model with the new corpus. Don't do that! That's dumb!
The net effect of MRIing everyone on public health would likely be enormously positive as long as you don't do that.
Take PSA, since it's a simpler example. You're right that, if we screen everyone, taking action based on the outcome causes more harm than good. The response is to calibrate... which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
With the MRI, you don't get back simple dichotomous things, but you get back potential indications. That can be scary - talk about calibration all you want, but if patients see things and start thinking about the big C word there are likely to be a lot of unnecessary biopsies.
The bottom line is that it's possible to imagine a benefit, but it is not reasonable to pretend it's as simple as "just re-calibrate your interpretation of the results!". There's a reason that a lot of thought goes into when to do screening.
> which means we don't learn anything usefully actionable from the test and shouldn't apply it.
This just isn't true. In practice any such screening model can ALWAYS improve with more data—basically because the statistical power goes up and up—up to an asymptote set by noise in the physical process itself.
> That can be scary
Handling that is the job of professionals, is now and will continue to be.
It is extremely reasonable to imagine a benefit! What is doubtful is imagining there wouldn't be one!
I find the line of reasoning in this whole anti-MRI-everyone argument to be bewildering. I think it is basically an emotional argument, which has set in as "established truth" by repetition; people will trot it out by instinct whenever they encounter any situation that suggests it. It reflects lessons collectively learned from the history of medicine, its over-estimation of its own abilities and its overfitting to data, and its ever-increasing sensitivity to liability.
But it is not inherently true—it is really a statement about poor statistical and policy practices in the field, which could be rectified with concerted effort, with a potential for great public upside.
Not that any of this matters at the current price point. But, on a brief investigation, the amortized cost of a single MRI scan is ~$500-800—perhaps 1/5 what I would have guessed!
It's more akin to KYC and AML laws.
I've heard many horror stories of bank/brokerage accounts being frozen despite all deposits being legitimate, not to mention not being able to transfer large amounts or not even being allowed to open an account.
Meanwhile crooks somehow manage to have bank accounts in all the big banks without issues.
That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s** if the positive is false or not.
>That is why they're doing it. They're looking for pretexts to reduce headcount. They don't give a s* if the positive is false or not.
At least we're still at the stage where they're bothering to find pretext. There is still hope.
Is there? They are already a few rungs up from illegal criminals. Not much further to get to anyone since these are approved visa holders. Im just waiting for them to declare all Californians as non-citizens at this point.
That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union.
Coastal Oregon and coastal Washington can come too.
I’m ready for it. Good luck to the rest of the country without our food and industry lol.
Here are some thoughts from a U.S. citizen whose wife is an immigrant.
I have spent more than two and a half years filing forms and preparing paperwork for the U.S. government. I handled everything myself, without any “special” help or legal advice. I simply downloaded the forms from USCIS, filled them out using the required information, and submitted them.
What I can tell you is this: there is a massive market in the United States built on gray-area schemes, semi-legal shortcuts, and so-called expert advice. For example, there are companies charging $30,000 to submit a form that costs only $745 to file. Many “helpers” sell visa “upgrades.” The idea is that you arrive on a tourist visa and then follow a specific sequence of steps to convert it into a green card - something packaged and sold as a premium service for an extraordinary price.
This is a very large and lucrative slice of the pie that most people know little about. Both the U.S. visa process and tax filing system are riddled with gray practices and questionable “solutions.” Too often, the end result is that people are told to outright lie about their visa status or their taxes because they were instructed to do so.
From what I have observed, I would not call these practices outright foolish. Overblown at times? Yes, perhaps. But unnecessary? Not really.
Every single person on the planet has broken some rule or another. If they want to kick all visa holders out they might as well do it without all the pretense (and save a bunch of money in the process).
At this point it seems they are trying to drag everyone through the mud so individuals have to waste all their personal time and capital fighting a deep pocketed state.
Three felonies a day. — Harvey A. Silverglate
Coming from an administration free of sinners or criminal records. \s
This won't happen in practice because it's incredibly impractical. It would require massive amounts of manpower and be very expensive.
Also visas expire, so why not simply implement better checks for new visas. Most of the 55M visas are probably fine, so you have to spend an exorbitant amount of resource on finding very few issues. It's much cheaper to add additional check to new visa applications.
55M is also just a crazy amount of visas for a country with 350M citizens. Especially given that I'd guess that a large amount of people travel to the US on a visa waive program.
Have you heard of Palantir? They have all the data they need after all the DOGE thefts.
Why can't they retain stories like Dredd, The Minority Report and Continuum as fiction? They were supposed to be warnings, not user manuals. Something being possible doesn't always mean that it's a good idea.
PS: This rather useless comment is actually an expression of frustration. We are a population of more than 8 billion. Why are such concepts even tolerated?
get a DOGE staffer to run it through AI like they've been doing for all the other things they are wrecking
Yes, literally the first thing I thought of was "oh, another government LLM use case." Exactly the same crap doge was doing.
Whatever contractor is working on this is probably salivating at the opportunity to refine capabilities. I still think at some point this is going to be used to field questions like "ok, show me the top 10 citizens in this area who regularly engage in X online behavior."
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
Guests in a country should follow some basic rules, starting with the laws.
Who here would be happy if you invited a guest into your house and they ignored your customs like no shoes in the house or clean up after yourself.
Why should countries be different.
> Who here would be happy if you invited a guest into your house and they ignored your customs like no shoes in the house or clean up after yourself.
It would be very reasonable to be unhappy about that, for sure. However, it's also reasonable to be unhappy when my neighbor kicks me out of their house for not taking off my shoes rather than reminding me to take them off. I'd probably stop visiting that neighbor, especially if the other people in my neighborhood could tell me similar stories.
As someone else already pointed out, it's rather easy to find one law or the other that any particular person has broken - that's a fundamental problem with laws everywhere. So what you suggest is rather impractical when the regime is on a mission to find at least one for every 'guest'. But okay, your country your rules. But there is a catch. If you insist on treating every guest as a criminal to be confirmed, to be marched out like animals on chains without any due process for them to defend their reputation, then get ready to be treated as the ghetto of the world. That's a consequence of every guest and every country expecting to be treated with dignity. That's one thing you cannot control and practically the entire rest of the world is in the other camp.
I'm sure you're confident about the ability of your citizens to hold up the nation without any help. I'm not going to argue. I admire all societies and cultures for their unique abilities and achievements. But you would be worried if you knew how much these 'guests' contributed to your nation's greatness across time and across every strata of your society. They built everything from your earliest railroads to your biggest rockets. They man your remotest farms to the top echelons of your administration. You'd be underestimating their importance to your welfare at your own peril.
But forget the guests. I'm worried about you people too. Nations treat the visas they issue and even asylum requests with great respect. The guests are given almost all the protections as citizens - only the right to influence the governance is denied. But that situation has changed rapidly recently. Not only are the legal guests being abused, the treatment is gradually being extended to legal citizens, with the attempts to cancel birthright and naturalized citizenship. Two measures are extremely concerning - many of the deported immigrants had no criminal records anywhere. And citizens like the 4 year old cancer patient were deported by putting their immigrant parents in an impossible situation. At this rate, how long till they start applying it to citizens like you? Never forget what someone said about 'home growns'. Clearly, your conduct is not what defines your standing. Are you sure you're on the right side in this regime's eyes?
I could taunt you for your confidence, which I wouldn't hold in the same situation. But I don't enjoy anyone's pain or misery. That pain and misery won't be as bad as what others had to suffer due to the cruelty of some of your leaders - like shell-shocked orphans wandering aimlessly in the streets or mothers wailing inconsolably over the graves of their toddler children. But pain is still pain. And I'm worried. Just prepare for whatever is coming and hunker down. No one's future is guaranteed, including mine. So, good luck for now. I hope to continue this conversation on the other side.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977417
Why was this flagged?
Good answer for why found in the comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979622
Because enough people clicked the flag link. If enough of them click the flag link on this one, it'll get flagged too!
Flagging is there for stuff that's off-topic or generating low-quality discussion in the views of the people clicking the flag link. Sometimes the admins will step in to unflag the article if it looks like neither of these apply, and/or if it would be helpful to have a containment topic for discussion of a particularly popular contentious topic.
> Because enough people clicked the flag link.
Tautology isn't a useful reply to this question. At best it's a distraction, and at worst deflection. That people clicked the flagged link is already apparent by virtue of the post having been marked as flagged. That doesn't engage with why it was flagged.
I disagree, but maybe if I elaborate (as perhaps I should have done) it'll be clearer. The comment was intended to make two points:
0. the link was clicked by users of the site. The admins claim not to have any influence; I'm sure they do (if they want), but they seem to often enough rescue discussions from the flagged set that we can assume the readership exercises significant influence and there's no shadowy cabal generally trying to suppress wrongthink, as some seem to suppose. (Of course, perhaps there are a lot of people in the readership that are, and maybe they collude, but that is true for everything, and a far less interesting point)
1. if you want to know why the article was flagged, you will have to individually ask the people that flagged it. Sure, if you post the question here, it stands a non-zero chance of attracting the odd comment from these people, but it's quite obviously an inefficient way of finding out. What better ways are there? Well... none, really. But that means the answer is essentially unknowable, and the question barely worth asking.
So with the question barely worth asking - why ask it? It's just a sure-fire way to attract low-quality speculation, that will almost certainly blame it on: well, take your pick! - in some unproductive fashion, probably engendering some ongoing predictable discussion about the current bugbears of cranks of whatever stripe end up joining in.
(Or, suppose the question is posed by somebody unsure how the flag mechanism works: I think my reply actually does cover this case well enough.)
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