CB, I've had my quota of bad experiences with doctors misdiagnosing death-dealing diseases.
I think the underlying problem is they, like nearly everyone, seek the obvious and most likely answer to a problem and grab at correlation rather than ensuring causation. It's easier to assume sars is flu than to go through all the drama unnecessarily if it is just a cold.
The obvious and common answer nearly always gets the right answer. But it means the rare but lethal wolf in sheep's clothing escapes undetected, which is Henry's concern with the coughs and colds in Vancouver, which just happen to have artifacts of various sars bugs or antibodies, which are ignored as being mistakes in testing, which is wrong, as Henry has pointed out, [given the various DNA types involved in the alleged contaminations].
In defence of lack of imagination, doctors are dealing constantly with frightened, ignorant people with wild imaginations, many with actual psychological problems, and personality issues which make analysis and treatment difficult. So the doctors probably need to minimize imagination rather than add to it, to enable them to manage the patient, not to mention avoid excessive costs, keep the patients flowing through and till ringing up sales.
On death, the value of what sits in our heads is huge and the desire to put an old head on young shoulders is strong. I remember as a 20 year old being amazed at how the old fellas knew so much. Having gone through decades of learning stuff, I see now how come they did know so much. It's such a hassle to learn things. The cost of ignorance is vast. Every person born has to relearn all the stuff. What a waste. Better for nature to just make people live longer to maintain valuable knowledge.
Better still is to make knowledge extra-somatic. Meaning store the knowledge outside the mortal neurons and call on it as required. The ask Grandad idea. Books achieved this to some extent. Encyclopedias sold by the million. Dictionaries. How to manuals. But that's cumbersome and it doesn't help skill development and intuitive understanding of situations, which comes with practise. Golf can't be learned from a book. Swinging at the ball is the only way, as well as learning to control one's own mind.
By storing the knowledge all over cyberspace and having wireless cyberlinks, people can solve the problem for a LOT of things. A vastly more complex world can be handled when there's a Googleplex of knowledge available in an instant.
Which doesn't solve the thinking aspect of knowledge. Knowing is useless without the ability to think, using that knowledge, to solve problems and manage situations.
The industrial revolution replaced muscles. The photoelectronic semiconductor revolution is replacing memory. But we still have to think. Which is a struggle. Replacing the thinking process would be good. Most of us are quite hopeless at thinking, so it's an opportunity begging to be achieved.
While it's claimed that computers can't think, they play a mean game of chess, which is near enough to thinking.
After that, there's still self-actualization and creativity. I'll leave that for another day, when I can think.
Mqurice |
