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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

Part of it may be that we have already done the easy parts of making medicine and education efficient. I can watch a lecture from a world class professor on my bus ride, or get an alert from my watch if I have an arrhythmia.

If I want to ask the professor a question, or figure out why I have an arrhythmia I need to get personal attention and that is much harder.

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It's fairly well accepted [citation needed?] that the most effective form of academic education is private tutoring by skilled tutors. We're (possibly) on the cusp of that being accessible to everyone via LLMs.

In that brave new world schools need to shift towards a focus on development of personal character. MDs, at least those that you speak to in person, need to focus on bedside manner.

I once chatted with a professor Doctor who was of the opinion that most people going into med school probably would've had decent bedside manners if left to their own devices, but between there and internship, 95% of them wind up having it all trained out of them.

You don't think Aldous Huxley would be dandy with android MD's ;)?

Do people wind up in (what we would call) hospital in BNW, or do they get given an overdose* of soma while the next one gets decanted?

* compare George V's last moments (time, manner, and place; especially time) I'd call it an influence, except it happened 4 years after BNW was published.

I hadn't read Island but I'd like to imagine those kin of Hugin/Munin are cyborg MDs :)

>Farnaby awakens on the island with a leg injury, hearing a myna bird screaming "Attention"

Here Aldous seems to have gone beyond merely reacting to neoEdwardism..

Huh, found it at https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/huxleya-island/huxleya-island-00...

So far reminding me a bit (in backstory) of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twenty-One_Balloons

Grateful for the refs (incl. the aristotelian epigraph, the newbery)

>Will remembered suddenly his favourite worst line of poetry.

https://harpers.org/2009/10/arnolds-to-a-friend/

>The up-beat high Victorian view of art as a cure to the woes of society

https://harpers.org/2009/10/forster-what-the-great-minds-tel...

地獄楽 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Paradise:_Jigokuraku

Did the Victorians and the Soviets both believe that time/access was the only thing keeping the proletariat from being as enthused about Art as their "betters"?

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42185423 (and Katya's sports car, accessorised with radio and small dog)

Huxley called "habitus" well before Bourdieu: Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.

EDIT: "Hell — is other people" (JPS) "...whose interests aren't aligned [being] thrown into an enclosed space and forced to work together." (YK)

Unless there are any immortals (we saw a one-tail fox this morning) on HN, we're also all (along with several deer yesterday) sentenced to death ... although some of us pledge (logically if foolishly) to seek the Elixir of Life, or die trying.

>"habitus"

You're egging (ikigaing) me on to find the countermanding quote in Island

Definitely (imho)!

For more entertainment in this direction, consider looking at the not-very-conclusive back&forth between SSC (a healthcare practioner) & Robin Hanson (a theorist) on the effectiveness of healthcare spending.

[It's telling that the practioner is in the house that believes that healthcare spending has been mostly effective.. re: SSC is saying that "the easy parts are still there?"]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

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