I know that it was probably a spell-check error, but as someone who used to live in Denmark, swapping the two nations is an annoyingly common error that grates me.
'every civilization, at every time in its history, faced major problems'. The rarest of things - an online historical perspective on our current problems.
This should be inscribed above the door of every school, university and government building in the West, to stop people thinking they're walking into a doomed institution.
I keep trying to tell people that World War II was the most destructive event in world history, and yet it is virtually impossible to find any trace of its impact 80 years later.
My motto: Whatever was built can be rebuilt. This applies to any damage from the Trump administration.
Example: After the resignation of Nixon, Congress passed laws with the goal of dismantling the imperial presidency. These laws worked pretty well for 50 years, but apparently they need strengthening.
That's true. Over here there's still the iron railing stumps and rows of Victorian terraced housing punctuated by half a dozen 1950's low-cost houses, to remind us of the War :-). Mind you, we as a nation, have been dining out on those 6 years in the 1940's, ever since.
Regarding radiologists, I offer the example of the washing machine.
Washing machines are a classic example of a slowly adopted technology. We moderns struggle to understand why, but back in the day, getting your laundry clean involved a lot of manual labor either from yourself, or from a washerwoman you had to pay. The result... the well off were visibly cleaner and better mended than the poor.
So when 'clean laundry' was democratized by new tech, elites didn't want it. They poo-poo'ed the new machines, and explained that their human washerwomen MUST do a better job than a stupid machine ever could. So the poors apparently clean clothing was actually not REALLY clean, etc. And they continued to pay washerwomen for a generation or two more. Slowing machine adoption, or at least extending that career path.
We live with a tiered health care system, where elite customers can pay for human radiologist interventions (checking the AI analysis), or even mandate that such be the norm for everyone. I would argue that access to excellent healthcare is currently as class-charged a concept as clean clothes were in the 1880s.
There's a similar effect today with dishwashers where people (especially if they or their parents are reasonably recent immigrants from poorer countries) are 100% convinced that dishwashers can't wash dishes as well as humans, despite every single restaurant (in the west) they've ever eaten at using a dishwasher and they couldn't tell.
Dishwashers are not always useful except at table service restaurants. Many others do without.
As for the immigrants' perception, they are correct: dishwashers can't wash and dry dishes as well as diligent humans, that's plainly obvious. The choice about using a machine is based on caring about quality, and about available human time and diligence, which might be different for the immigrants you've encountered.
At home, where I know both the machine and the people, I can look at a glass or dish and often know which member of the family hand-washed it, or even which member of the family loaded it in the dishwasher.
It's not plainly obvious. There have been multiple studies showing you are wrong. Dishwashers get dishes cleaner.
Belke L, Maitra W, Stamminger R (2018) Global consumer study to identify the potential of water-saving in dishwashing, Energy Effic, 11, 1887–1895. https://doi.org/10.100...
-Berkholz P, Kobersky V, Stamminger R (2013). Comparative analysis of global consumer behaviour in the context of different manual dishwashing methods. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 37, 46–58. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Fuss N & Stamminger, R (2010). Manual dishwashing: how can it be optimized? International Journal of Consumer Studies, (5), 432–348. https://doi.org/10.313...
-Fuss N & Stamminger R (2012). Application of best practice tips in manual dishwashing in Germany and Spain, Int J Consum Stud, 36, 173–182. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Knowles Weaver E, Bloom CE, Feldmiller I (1956). A study of hand versus mechanical dishwashing methods. Res. Bull. 1956, 772, 1–43.
-Maitra W, Belke L, Stamminger S, Nijhuis B, Presti C (2017): Scope of improvement in water usage efficiency in manual dishwashing: a multicountry study by questionnaire survey. International Journal of Consumer Studies. https://doi.org/10.111....
-Porras GY, Keoleian GA, Lewis GM, Seeba N (2020). A guide to household manual and machine dishwashing through a life cycle perspective. Environmental Research Communications 2(2)024002: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.108...
-Schencking L, Stamminger R (2022). What science knows about our daily dishwashing routine. Tenside Surfactants Deterg. 59, 205-220. https://doi.org/10.151...
-Stamminger R, Elschenbroich A, Rummler B, Broil G (2007) Dishwashing under various consumer-relevant conditions, Hauswirtschaft und Wissenschaft, 81–88.
-Stamminger R, Schmitz A, Hook I (2018) Why consumers in Europe do not use energy efficient automatic dishwashers to clean their dishes? Energy Effic, 12, 567–583. doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9648-2
I'm glad I'm not Stamminger. What a dismal career.
I smell an AI generated list, which appears to miss the mark. BTW, the links are all broken.
Note that by better, I wasn't referring to sterilization, water usage, energy or time, as found in the study titles above. I mean that glasses and dishes appear clear of food and spots. Diligent humans are better at those things.
If you doubt this, consider how often humans have to wash dishes after a dishwasher fails to clean them (even after repeated attempts). This doesn't occur the other way around.
1. Radiologists also do procedures: venography, angiography and biopsies that require manipulating a needle or a catheter. AI cannot do that nor can robots acting autonomously.
2. More scans per visit is not improved productivity if it doesn’t lead to better outcomes. There is an agency problem here as there is in much medical practice: doctors are very good at creating work for themselves.
On your first point, EVERY forecast by the ICCP has been revised upward in terms of the damages and costs of warming. And this from Bill Mckibbin today: +Very ungood news: a record increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year, up 3.5 parts per million which is the fastest one-year climb since se started taking measurements. Obviously the biggest part of that is ongoing combustion of fossil fuels—but there are also worrying signs that the natural carbon sinks in oceans and forests are beginning to buckle.
Dr Oksana Tarasova, a WMO senior scientific officer, said: “There is concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the amount of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming. Sustained and strengthened greenhouse gas monitoring is critical to understanding these loops.”
So if there is a scientific reason for your optimism, please do share.
Noah is obsessed with complaining about how the "left" over stresses MMGW over the economic benefits of green energy, but as far as that may be true, his is the kind of glib denialism that provokes it.
To build on your point: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions, per Our World in Data, totaled 37.8 billion tons in 2024, and the trend is still going up. Technology has the potential to solve to deliver a low-carbon future, and China in particular is making good progress with solar, wind, batteries, and EVs. But will it be fast enough to avoid devastation? Being "spared the worst" is not very comforting, if "the worst" is uninhabitability. We're experiencing losses already -- direct damage to currently small numbers from wildfires, heat waves, and tropical storms, indirect damage to larger numbers from wildfire smoke, drought. We've pretty much used up the carbon budget to remain below a 1.5 degree increase in temperature, and it's less and less likely that we'll stay below 2 degrees by 2050 unless we more quickly shift to renewables and electrify transport and home heating. The market is moving faster, but not fast enough, in large part because we don't price in the externality of dumping CO2 into the biosphere, and in part because developers building solar farms find it hard to make a profit when the daytime price for solar drops near zero. And the solar panel makers in China have competed away almost all their profits. Meanwhile every country with reserves of oil and gas wants to exploit them and quickly, for fear of missing the market -- especially new entrants like Guyana, Gabon, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The competition for sales should keep fossil fuel prices low enough to enable internal combustion engines to compete with EVs on total cost of ownership for a few extra years.
Where is the evidence that EVERY forecast of the ICCP ( I assume you actually mean the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the IPCC ) has been revised upwards? The scenarios used by McKibben and other alarmists cite are usually the RCP8.5/SSP5 which has been already proven to be completely off the track of reality with hugely increasing world population and reverting most electric generation to coal, none of which are happening. These scenarios haven’t been updated in 3 years at least.
Even though the CO2 concentration has increased by 3.5 PPM to 423.9 PPM last year, that hasn’t had any significant impacts as there is no decrease in crop production or hurricanes or other disasters that can be attributed to the increase in warming. McKibben named his group 350.org because he claimed if the CO2 level went above 350ppm the world would end and here we are at 423.9 and the impacts have been minimal.
Just a bit pedantic, but you mentioned that Denmark is nationalizing a Chinese owned semiconductor company; while in the FT post that you cited, and the paragraph that you quote, all mentioned that the Dutch government conducted the nationalization.
At least you should double check what you cited for better credibility of your writing though.
Not really related to anything but how did "the Anglosphere" come to mean "no, I don't mean India, I know they speak English there but it doesn't count. Nigeria and the Phillipines? Look this is getting awkward without making me seem like I'm racist. Kenya? Pls stop. South Africa? sigh. Malaysia? Yeah not them either. New Zealand? Come on in!"
I think it always meant to be "Britain and its white settler colonies + Ireland", since even though Nigeria speaks English and inherits institutions from the British, they did not inherit all British institutions and policies though.
(No political leaders behind that project ever thought to make India a full member, since that would mean the Empire would be ruled from Delhi! Also African colonies, apart from South Africa, would not count).
Personal view: I believe that in a timeline that South Africa was not formed (and Cape Colony remained independent), then such a Cape Republic could be a full member of the Anglosphere.
Is it possible that the trend is older Nobel laureates is the increased nature of winner-take-all grant processes plus general gerontocracy, wherein the older established labs with older established PIs just get more money and have more grad students at their disposal to direct? By all accounts it is extremely hard for new PI's to establish themselves. The vibe is that "back in the day a newly minted PhD with grit and gusto could get cracking on good research, but now both because of societal factors (grants and reputation) and scientific ones (the scientific horizon is further out and takes longer to reach) that's just not true anymore.
Not sure dutchland is in Denmark. But I really like the radiologist Ai analysis. And doesn’t this apply to so many areas of work. Which raises the question how will the investment in Ai ever get paid back at any reasonable margin.
A pretty similar paradigm happens with Amazon as well: the new delivery system of Amazon ended up needing more people to deliver goods to users comparing to supermarkets/traditional stores.
To add to your excellent point about "why are there so many radiologists?" I think people need to stop focusing on using AI to eliminate jobs and instead focus on how it increases productivity in the roles that already exist. AI is really terrible at replacing humans whole cloth but really good as a force multiplier.
Let AI do that it's good at -- analyzing radiology images -- and let radiologists spend more time on the other things they do where they're much better than AI. Perhaps over time we see a 30% reduction in the number of radiologists. But it's naive to think we're just going to stamp out "replacement humans" in an "AI factory". AI doesn't replace humans, it just makes each of us capable of so much more.
So the picture is a Northern European degrowther woman lecturing you on all the evils you did that will not stop climate change, inequality, and supposed decline of infrastructure? That's funny :D
‘the world will probably be spared the worst’ - and what if not? By now everyone can feel the effects of climate change, man made or not. We just chill out, because China is doing great?
Alarmism is the best thing to do, because it creates URGENCY.
If there is even only a minuscule chance that we are screwing up because we are too slow & careless, it should be addressed.
In Factfulness Hans Rosling mentioned that: "Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental actions, and careful evaluation. Exaggeration undermines the credibility of well-founded data...once discovered, makes people tune out altogether."
And you can just think how climate change deniers have used worst-case scenarios that turned out to be wrong, to undermine scientific warning about actual impact of climate change!
Alarmism creates urgency amongst the Pre Convinced, and saps credibility beyond that.
But you are nicely illustrating Noah's point for him, Lefty Left believes exaggeration is the path to getting its way because innumerately treating tail risk as core risk they think this is broadly motivating.
As Nguyen below notes, innumerate alarmism will generate stupid ill-balanced decisions, at higher cost and further the exaggerated Oh the World End is Nigh doomerist alarmism end up undermining overall credibility outside of your own circles.
Rushed actions with poor economics will create avoidable backlash and undermine real progress.
May I point out that righty right trump and his crew used alarmism and still does to cement the last election and as I see it will probably manage to win or steal the mid terms based on an increasing alarmism that now includes rich anarchist passing out wooden poles for banners. It’s strange that when it comes to climate pointing out genuine consequences is alarmist and is not effective. Yet Trumps rhetorical gift , clanging large bells can effectively dismantle a constitution.
You can make the assertion, although such assertion confuses apples and rocks as comparables. It's not even confusing different fruits...
Trump political campaigning is about Trump and the Trump immediate timeline with about zero regard to the future and long-term
the utter opposite of what one wants for effective climate policy that is sustainable both economically and politically and doesn't run off into a ditch (see Biden Admin).
And pointing out "genuine" consequences where one uses tail extreme cases as the asserted base case (as well as engaging in significant time-compression for results), which is both innumerate and dishonest as well as decr
The Alarmism has led to the LEfty Greens losing credibility on multiuple fronts, on both convincing public they are not engaging in usual Lefty Doom & Gloom - that it's reality - and in blundering themselves into pushing for policies that end up being entirely self-harming for sustained action - due to rushing and poor understanding of economics. Example of heat pumps (germany), etc.
My own area of renewables investment has been undercut in credibility due to Lefty alarmism combined with innumeracy.
I think that more reflects the personality of the people trying to create a sense of alarm rather than the actual reality we live in.
And, by the way, you are basically admitting that the alarmism is a form of manipulation of other people, so indirectly you are proving Noah (and most other people) correct.
You seem to have an issue with lefty alarmism and you’re also into renewables investment but we can’t mention righty right who don’t even believe there’s a climate shift. And who wants to destroy your renewables. Just not sure what your point is about lefty alarmism when the right has the same rhetorical framing. Maybe some specifics would help me understand your point.
“Because AI engineers don’t really understand all the things radiologists do, they will be slow to design AI systems that address all of these tasks. And even when someone does get around to addressing this problem, it’s not clear when we’ll get AI that’s as good at humans at all of these tasks. Humans may remain in the loop.”
The problem with this sunny outlook is that I’ll give you three guesses as to what human radiologists actually get paid for, and I’ll spot you that it’s not instructing students, technologists or talking to colleagues about studies.
So let’s think about the scenario where AI is real good at reading studies and you decide to employ one actual radiologist for every 4 you used to as some sort of quality control arbiter as exists with MDs and advanced providers in some states? I’m sure technologists who do nothing but setup the same exams day in and day out rapidly become much better than any radiologist at the actual job of acquiring high quality studies, so I doubt they’re going to be much needed for that.
Editorial note: Netherlands not Denmark (Dutch not Dane)
I know that it was probably a spell-check error, but as someone who used to live in Denmark, swapping the two nations is an annoyingly common error that grates me.
My first reaction was: “Oh, Noah, not you too!”
: )
Not that it's a big deal, but It's simpler than ever to avoid that kinda mistake with AI.
'every civilization, at every time in its history, faced major problems'. The rarest of things - an online historical perspective on our current problems.
This should be inscribed above the door of every school, university and government building in the West, to stop people thinking they're walking into a doomed institution.
Jon, as a professional historian, 100% agreement.
I keep trying to tell people that World War II was the most destructive event in world history, and yet it is virtually impossible to find any trace of its impact 80 years later.
My motto: Whatever was built can be rebuilt. This applies to any damage from the Trump administration.
Example: After the resignation of Nixon, Congress passed laws with the goal of dismantling the imperial presidency. These laws worked pretty well for 50 years, but apparently they need strengthening.
That's true. Over here there's still the iron railing stumps and rows of Victorian terraced housing punctuated by half a dozen 1950's low-cost houses, to remind us of the War :-). Mind you, we as a nation, have been dining out on those 6 years in the 1940's, ever since.
Yes... Crisisism where every daily problem is "a Crisis"...
True. The news media are under so much pressure to grab readers attention, they feel they have to feed the problem.
Regarding radiologists, I offer the example of the washing machine.
Washing machines are a classic example of a slowly adopted technology. We moderns struggle to understand why, but back in the day, getting your laundry clean involved a lot of manual labor either from yourself, or from a washerwoman you had to pay. The result... the well off were visibly cleaner and better mended than the poor.
So when 'clean laundry' was democratized by new tech, elites didn't want it. They poo-poo'ed the new machines, and explained that their human washerwomen MUST do a better job than a stupid machine ever could. So the poors apparently clean clothing was actually not REALLY clean, etc. And they continued to pay washerwomen for a generation or two more. Slowing machine adoption, or at least extending that career path.
We live with a tiered health care system, where elite customers can pay for human radiologist interventions (checking the AI analysis), or even mandate that such be the norm for everyone. I would argue that access to excellent healthcare is currently as class-charged a concept as clean clothes were in the 1880s.
There's a similar effect today with dishwashers where people (especially if they or their parents are reasonably recent immigrants from poorer countries) are 100% convinced that dishwashers can't wash dishes as well as humans, despite every single restaurant (in the west) they've ever eaten at using a dishwasher and they couldn't tell.
Dishwashers are not always useful except at table service restaurants. Many others do without.
As for the immigrants' perception, they are correct: dishwashers can't wash and dry dishes as well as diligent humans, that's plainly obvious. The choice about using a machine is based on caring about quality, and about available human time and diligence, which might be different for the immigrants you've encountered.
At home, where I know both the machine and the people, I can look at a glass or dish and often know which member of the family hand-washed it, or even which member of the family loaded it in the dishwasher.
It's not plainly obvious. There have been multiple studies showing you are wrong. Dishwashers get dishes cleaner.
Belke L, Maitra W, Stamminger R (2018) Global consumer study to identify the potential of water-saving in dishwashing, Energy Effic, 11, 1887–1895. https://doi.org/10.100...
-Berkholz P, Kobersky V, Stamminger R (2013). Comparative analysis of global consumer behaviour in the context of different manual dishwashing methods. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 37, 46–58. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Fuss N & Stamminger, R (2010). Manual dishwashing: how can it be optimized? International Journal of Consumer Studies, (5), 432–348. https://doi.org/10.313...
-Fuss N & Stamminger R (2012). Application of best practice tips in manual dishwashing in Germany and Spain, Int J Consum Stud, 36, 173–182. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Knowles Weaver E, Bloom CE, Feldmiller I (1956). A study of hand versus mechanical dishwashing methods. Res. Bull. 1956, 772, 1–43.
-Maitra W, Belke L, Stamminger S, Nijhuis B, Presti C (2017): Scope of improvement in water usage efficiency in manual dishwashing: a multicountry study by questionnaire survey. International Journal of Consumer Studies. https://doi.org/10.111....
-Porras GY, Keoleian GA, Lewis GM, Seeba N (2020). A guide to household manual and machine dishwashing through a life cycle perspective. Environmental Research Communications 2(2)024002: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.108...
-Schencking L, Stamminger R (2022). What science knows about our daily dishwashing routine. Tenside Surfactants Deterg. 59, 205-220. https://doi.org/10.151...
-Stamminger R, Elschenbroich A, Rummler B, Broil G (2007) Dishwashing under various consumer-relevant conditions, Hauswirtschaft und Wissenschaft, 81–88.
-Stamminger R, Schmitz A, Hook I (2018) Why consumers in Europe do not use energy efficient automatic dishwashers to clean their dishes? Energy Effic, 12, 567–583. doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9648-2
I'm glad I'm not Stamminger. What a dismal career.
I smell an AI generated list, which appears to miss the mark. BTW, the links are all broken.
Note that by better, I wasn't referring to sterilization, water usage, energy or time, as found in the study titles above. I mean that glasses and dishes appear clear of food and spots. Diligent humans are better at those things.
If you doubt this, consider how often humans have to wash dishes after a dishwasher fails to clean them (even after repeated attempts). This doesn't occur the other way around.
I can't believe we're even debating this.
Two points about radiology:
1. Radiologists also do procedures: venography, angiography and biopsies that require manipulating a needle or a catheter. AI cannot do that nor can robots acting autonomously.
2. More scans per visit is not improved productivity if it doesn’t lead to better outcomes. There is an agency problem here as there is in much medical practice: doctors are very good at creating work for themselves.
On your first point, EVERY forecast by the ICCP has been revised upward in terms of the damages and costs of warming. And this from Bill Mckibbin today: +Very ungood news: a record increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year, up 3.5 parts per million which is the fastest one-year climb since se started taking measurements. Obviously the biggest part of that is ongoing combustion of fossil fuels—but there are also worrying signs that the natural carbon sinks in oceans and forests are beginning to buckle.
Dr Oksana Tarasova, a WMO senior scientific officer, said: “There is concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the amount of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming. Sustained and strengthened greenhouse gas monitoring is critical to understanding these loops.”
So if there is a scientific reason for your optimism, please do share.
Noah is obsessed with complaining about how the "left" over stresses MMGW over the economic benefits of green energy, but as far as that may be true, his is the kind of glib denialism that provokes it.
To build on your point: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions, per Our World in Data, totaled 37.8 billion tons in 2024, and the trend is still going up. Technology has the potential to solve to deliver a low-carbon future, and China in particular is making good progress with solar, wind, batteries, and EVs. But will it be fast enough to avoid devastation? Being "spared the worst" is not very comforting, if "the worst" is uninhabitability. We're experiencing losses already -- direct damage to currently small numbers from wildfires, heat waves, and tropical storms, indirect damage to larger numbers from wildfire smoke, drought. We've pretty much used up the carbon budget to remain below a 1.5 degree increase in temperature, and it's less and less likely that we'll stay below 2 degrees by 2050 unless we more quickly shift to renewables and electrify transport and home heating. The market is moving faster, but not fast enough, in large part because we don't price in the externality of dumping CO2 into the biosphere, and in part because developers building solar farms find it hard to make a profit when the daytime price for solar drops near zero. And the solar panel makers in China have competed away almost all their profits. Meanwhile every country with reserves of oil and gas wants to exploit them and quickly, for fear of missing the market -- especially new entrants like Guyana, Gabon, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The competition for sales should keep fossil fuel prices low enough to enable internal combustion engines to compete with EVs on total cost of ownership for a few extra years.
Where is the evidence that EVERY forecast of the ICCP ( I assume you actually mean the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the IPCC ) has been revised upwards? The scenarios used by McKibben and other alarmists cite are usually the RCP8.5/SSP5 which has been already proven to be completely off the track of reality with hugely increasing world population and reverting most electric generation to coal, none of which are happening. These scenarios haven’t been updated in 3 years at least.
Even though the CO2 concentration has increased by 3.5 PPM to 423.9 PPM last year, that hasn’t had any significant impacts as there is no decrease in crop production or hurricanes or other disasters that can be attributed to the increase in warming. McKibben named his group 350.org because he claimed if the CO2 level went above 350ppm the world would end and here we are at 423.9 and the impacts have been minimal.
Just a bit pedantic, but you mentioned that Denmark is nationalizing a Chinese owned semiconductor company; while in the FT post that you cited, and the paragraph that you quote, all mentioned that the Dutch government conducted the nationalization.
At least you should double check what you cited for better credibility of your writing though.
Its a clear typing error... this is a blog, not a news magazine.
You telling people they’re wrong about stuff is one of the main reasons I read your posts. You’re quite good at it!
Not really related to anything but how did "the Anglosphere" come to mean "no, I don't mean India, I know they speak English there but it doesn't count. Nigeria and the Phillipines? Look this is getting awkward without making me seem like I'm racist. Kenya? Pls stop. South Africa? sigh. Malaysia? Yeah not them either. New Zealand? Come on in!"
I think it always meant to be "Britain and its white settler colonies + Ireland", since even though Nigeria speaks English and inherits institutions from the British, they did not inherit all British institutions and policies though.
A similar way to look at the Anglosphere is this idea from late 19th century to unify the British Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Federation
(No political leaders behind that project ever thought to make India a full member, since that would mean the Empire would be ruled from Delhi! Also African colonies, apart from South Africa, would not count).
Personal view: I believe that in a timeline that South Africa was not formed (and Cape Colony remained independent), then such a Cape Republic could be a full member of the Anglosphere.
Agreed, except I think many would exclude Ireland. Anglo is typically a synonym for English or British ancestry.
>>instead, the EU is now insisting that Chinese investments transfer technology to local European companies
Oh how the table turns...
Haha yes good for the goose, good for the gander....
Is it possible that the trend is older Nobel laureates is the increased nature of winner-take-all grant processes plus general gerontocracy, wherein the older established labs with older established PIs just get more money and have more grad students at their disposal to direct? By all accounts it is extremely hard for new PI's to establish themselves. The vibe is that "back in the day a newly minted PhD with grit and gusto could get cracking on good research, but now both because of societal factors (grants and reputation) and scientific ones (the scientific horizon is further out and takes longer to reach) that's just not true anymore.
Not sure dutchland is in Denmark. But I really like the radiologist Ai analysis. And doesn’t this apply to so many areas of work. Which raises the question how will the investment in Ai ever get paid back at any reasonable margin.
A pretty similar paradigm happens with Amazon as well: the new delivery system of Amazon ended up needing more people to deliver goods to users comparing to supermarkets/traditional stores.
This phenomenon (Jevons' paradox) is one reason why there are arguments that technologies in this century would not solve the problems of aging population though: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201473576-the-age-of-decay
And such a massive build out of data centres. 💣
To add to your excellent point about "why are there so many radiologists?" I think people need to stop focusing on using AI to eliminate jobs and instead focus on how it increases productivity in the roles that already exist. AI is really terrible at replacing humans whole cloth but really good as a force multiplier.
Let AI do that it's good at -- analyzing radiology images -- and let radiologists spend more time on the other things they do where they're much better than AI. Perhaps over time we see a 30% reduction in the number of radiologists. But it's naive to think we're just going to stamp out "replacement humans" in an "AI factory". AI doesn't replace humans, it just makes each of us capable of so much more.
So the picture is a Northern European degrowther woman lecturing you on all the evils you did that will not stop climate change, inequality, and supposed decline of infrastructure? That's funny :D
That ( here AI Ghiblified ) meme has stayed around so long because it has no rational explanation, so you can assign it any meaning you want.
‘the world will probably be spared the worst’ - and what if not? By now everyone can feel the effects of climate change, man made or not. We just chill out, because China is doing great?
Alarmism is the best thing to do, because it creates URGENCY.
If there is even only a minuscule chance that we are screwing up because we are too slow & careless, it should be addressed.
In Factfulness Hans Rosling mentioned that: "Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects. Climate change is too important for that. It needs systematic analysis, thought-through decisions, incremental actions, and careful evaluation. Exaggeration undermines the credibility of well-founded data...once discovered, makes people tune out altogether."
And you can just think how climate change deniers have used worst-case scenarios that turned out to be wrong, to undermine scientific warning about actual impact of climate change!
Alarmism creates urgency amongst the Pre Convinced, and saps credibility beyond that.
But you are nicely illustrating Noah's point for him, Lefty Left believes exaggeration is the path to getting its way because innumerately treating tail risk as core risk they think this is broadly motivating.
As Nguyen below notes, innumerate alarmism will generate stupid ill-balanced decisions, at higher cost and further the exaggerated Oh the World End is Nigh doomerist alarmism end up undermining overall credibility outside of your own circles.
Rushed actions with poor economics will create avoidable backlash and undermine real progress.
May I point out that righty right trump and his crew used alarmism and still does to cement the last election and as I see it will probably manage to win or steal the mid terms based on an increasing alarmism that now includes rich anarchist passing out wooden poles for banners. It’s strange that when it comes to climate pointing out genuine consequences is alarmist and is not effective. Yet Trumps rhetorical gift , clanging large bells can effectively dismantle a constitution.
You can make the assertion, although such assertion confuses apples and rocks as comparables. It's not even confusing different fruits...
Trump political campaigning is about Trump and the Trump immediate timeline with about zero regard to the future and long-term
the utter opposite of what one wants for effective climate policy that is sustainable both economically and politically and doesn't run off into a ditch (see Biden Admin).
And pointing out "genuine" consequences where one uses tail extreme cases as the asserted base case (as well as engaging in significant time-compression for results), which is both innumerate and dishonest as well as decr
The Alarmism has led to the LEfty Greens losing credibility on multiuple fronts, on both convincing public they are not engaging in usual Lefty Doom & Gloom - that it's reality - and in blundering themselves into pushing for policies that end up being entirely self-harming for sustained action - due to rushing and poor understanding of economics. Example of heat pumps (germany), etc.
My own area of renewables investment has been undercut in credibility due to Lefty alarmism combined with innumeracy.
“Alarmism is the best thing to do?”
I think that more reflects the personality of the people trying to create a sense of alarm rather than the actual reality we live in.
And, by the way, you are basically admitting that the alarmism is a form of manipulation of other people, so indirectly you are proving Noah (and most other people) correct.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/is-green-activism-based-on-good-intentions
You seem to have an issue with lefty alarmism and you’re also into renewables investment but we can’t mention righty right who don’t even believe there’s a climate shift. And who wants to destroy your renewables. Just not sure what your point is about lefty alarmism when the right has the same rhetorical framing. Maybe some specifics would help me understand your point.
Chicken little didn’t prevent the sky from falling, she was just delusional.
If Erik is now at a16z, I’m really sorry but I’m going to update against believing in much of what he has to say.
“Because AI engineers don’t really understand all the things radiologists do, they will be slow to design AI systems that address all of these tasks. And even when someone does get around to addressing this problem, it’s not clear when we’ll get AI that’s as good at humans at all of these tasks. Humans may remain in the loop.”
The problem with this sunny outlook is that I’ll give you three guesses as to what human radiologists actually get paid for, and I’ll spot you that it’s not instructing students, technologists or talking to colleagues about studies.
So let’s think about the scenario where AI is real good at reading studies and you decide to employ one actual radiologist for every 4 you used to as some sort of quality control arbiter as exists with MDs and advanced providers in some states? I’m sure technologists who do nothing but setup the same exams day in and day out rapidly become much better than any radiologist at the actual job of acquiring high quality studies, so I doubt they’re going to be much needed for that.