Comment on Statistically unlikely

• ericwdhs@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If we’re putting effort into fixing how society uses words, can we work on flammable versus inflammable first? Then I vote for fixing the odd one out in the terrible, terrific, horrible, horrific quad. Then the split between awful and awe. Then…

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  • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    can we work on flammable versus inflammable first?

    no. also you missed horrid

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    • ericwdhs@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I didn’t miss it. It just doesn’t cleanly fit into this framework (imagine it as a square table instead of a list):

      Horror + -ble = horrible (bad) Horror + -ific = horrific (bad) Terror + -ble = terrible (bad) Terror + -ific = terrific (good)

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      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I’m suggesting we need a terrid

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• wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You’re making a semantic argument, which is kinda useless because what you’re suggesting wouldn’t change anything substantially, just the language we use to describe it. People would still go to the same programs to get the same qualifications, they would just be called something different.

  But language has inertia, and you’re never going to get people to stop calling them doctors, no matter how much you insist that they’re called “health engineers” or “A&P technicians” or whatever you come up with.

  Why not focus on something else like the much-needed systemic reforms in healthcare; getting business interests out of the medical system; socializing and universalizing healthcare if you live in a backwater country like the US; making sure mental, vision, hearing, and dental are included in that; training enough medical professionals and opening enough clinics to reduce waitlists and ensure everyone has timely access to the care they need; updating standard practices to be consistent with cutting edge research (this is especially important in mental healthcare!); actually funding research to find effective treatments even if that means entrenched healthcare companies offering subpar options have to adapt or become obsolete; et cetera.

  So many things to be concerned with that are more important than what we call the people with a medical degree…

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  • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Reforming the medical system is a pointless waste of time. We need to ban fossil fuels and animal agriculture. Animals are being slaughtered by the millions by factory farms. We shouldn’t waste time improving the way we care for humans, when humans are already doing so much better than other creatures like cows and corals. It’s a waste of effort to secure such marginal improvements for humans, when we can do so much more for animals.

    Actually, never mind. Dismissing problems by comparing them to bigger problems, AKA whataboutism, doesn’t actually make the world a better place. It doesn’t increase effort spent on the big problems, it just reduces effort on the smaller ones and makes the world a worse place. I retract the above paragraph; medical care reform is important too, even if it’s less impactful. And physicians calling themselves doctors, though relatively inconsequential, still annoys the crap out of Me.

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    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      We need to do a lot of things. But I don’t need to elucidate on that point because according to your second paragraph you already understand that.

      There’s a lot that needs to change about the world. It’ll happen incrementally until it reaches critical mass to happen all at once. But breaking it up into separate domains and acting like we need to focus on one thing at a time is nonsense.

      There are enough people in the world to divide things up according to expertise. Some people can work on reforming healthcare while others reform agriculture while others reform energy while others reform housing while others reform education while others reform whatever other sectors they’re involved with. There’s no need to put some sectors on hold until other sectors improve. That’ll just create a bottleneck and stifle progress.

      Some of these issues are interdependent anyway, and require simultaneous cross-sector reforms. For instance housing and agriculture reform depend on energy reform. Healthcare reforms depends on education reform. Honestly, it all depends on education reform. And possibly even electoral reform, which in turn also depends on education reform. But you can’t reform education without also reforming housing, energy, agriculture, elections, etc.

      The good news is we don’t need to do things one at a time. To use a computer analogy, we’re capable of parallel processing. Each sector is like a separate processor core, and each expert in a sector is like a separate thread in that core. We can do multi-threading, it’s fine.

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