Financial Markets, Money and the Real World By Paul Davidson, page 46, section 3.4:
The two fundamentally different concepts of uncertainty in economics are the classical theory concept where an uncertain future is actuarially certain and the Keynes concept where the future is unknown and unknowable.
I just had my first encounter with the US medical system outside of university. The place was part of the Beth Israel Medical Group, called Docs Physicians, and I went as a walk-in to the branch at 55 E 34th. They opened at 9am on saturday morning, so I arrived a bit early and had a coffee and bagel next door before I went in. There were two patients before me, and the wait was short (30 min) even though there was only one attending physician. I told the doctor that the last time I had suffered a prolonged cough from a cold, I had been prescribed an inhaler, and may have accelerated the diagnosis a bit that way. Docter was Keith Uleis, he ended up prescribing an antibiotic (Azithromycin), an inhaler (Albuterol) and a steroid (Prednisone) for inflammation control, after putting me on a nebulizer for 15 min to gauge the possible asthmatic effects. The charge for the consultation was $225, and filling my prescription next door at Pasteur Pharmacy cost $10 (steroid) + $40 (antibiotic) + $50 (inhaler) = $100.
I can't believe it took me this long to figure out that I needed to go to urgent care - am seriously wondering about the purpose of having a primary care physician, which I spent part of yesterday trying to pick out. The differences: one, familiarity with medical history; two, a more relationship-based, as opposed to transaction-based, incentive system; three, most importantly, scheduling flexibility.
Giving doctors uniform access to standardized medical records gets rid of the first point. As for the second, I dislike decision by anecdotal evidence, which is what the relationship model encourages. What I want is for my accessible doctor pool to be more effectively commoditized, by virture of some standard success record. Urgent care centers may provide that by acruing reputation as a collective and not on a doctor basis.
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Free will, rationality and intelligence are inseparable in definition.
In FREE WILL-EVEN FOR ROBOTS, McCarthy gives a definition of free will which boils down to the ability to say "I can, but I won't". To be able to say "I can", the system has to have built a representation of the world, complete with counterfactuals representing the way the individual parts of the world link and react to each other. To be able to say "I won't", the system needs to have a preference, that is, in its actions it is using its understanding of its cans and cannots (the counterfactuals) to drive the world towards a state more preferable to itself.
Seen this way, free will is a design pattern / framework. It is any representation-building goal-seeking system. Rationality, then, is a statement about the quality of the representations - if a free will makes choices that most effectively seek its goals, it is considered rational. Note that you need to know both the actions and the goals to determine rationality. Whenever I see papers on irrational behavior, I look carefully to see what goals they assume.
The study of human rationality poses problems because we often don't know what people want, and it isn't certain that you get the right answer by asking them. However, even when the goals sought are not known, there is progress that can be made towards assessing the presence of rationality. For example, if I assume that a person is walking with the goal of going from point A to point B, I don't have to know what those points are to observe that any path with a U-turn is suboptimal. (I think this underlies the unwillingness to make U-turns even when they are optimal going forward, because they provide everyone around you with an undeniable proof of suboptimality.) I would be wrong to conclude this for a sight-seeing tourist though, or an oil tanker that gets diverted because it receives news that the price of crude is now higher elsewhere.
What of intelligence then? Well, counterfactuals are built by processing data from the senses / memory. I consider all quality difference attributable to the processing, and not the data, to be intelligence. This is often described in terms of speed - by locking a person up in a room, the time needed to reach the final conclusion cannot be due to new data, and must therefore be due to the processing, i.e. how fast or slow the person is. This is for cases where a final conclusion exists - where given enough time all people arrive at the same answer. In cases where the answers are persistently different, it is more difficult to examine intelligence by itself - I believe this is why the slow/fast terminology persists.
2 comments
The reason you needed to go to urgent care is because you don't have a primary physician yet. A primary-care doctor should have been able to make the same diagnosis. Data from previous records is actually really useful for diagnosing a chronic illness, and prescribing treatment that had previously worked. It was just fortunate that you actually knew enough of your personal history.
Primary physicians take too much time to make an appointment. If indeed the primary care person was going to make the same diagnosis, then I would prefer urgent care, barring the fact that it is more expensive. Please note that urgent care is not ER, so I am not crowding out critical patients. I would not use urgent care for a chronic illness, though you might argue that the recurrent nature of my situation may make it cross that line.
Also, why assume that a primary physician will read your medical history better than the urgent care guy? If it is just because he has a monopoly on your record and is the only person who has a copy, then that is a ridiculous advantage to give the guy. There is a familiarity bias in medical care - just because someone has your record and has seen you before does not make him more competent at treating you. Consistency and accuracy are two separate things.