[ExI] a complicated patient is the bee: was RE: list test

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2013 1:46 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] list test

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Anders Sandberg  wrote:
> Email lists need a critical mass: if you see an email you might 
> respond with some probability p, but without email you are unlikely to 
> remember the list (post probability q << p). So the number of posts 
> next day from N people will be posts = N[p(1-(1-p)^N) + q(1-p)^N]
>...Andrew's post is a fine example of a q-type post.
> Anders

Ja, and this happens with the crazy interesting scientific development: a
general consensus on what is killing the bees.  I am particularly interested
in this because it agrees with what I had concluded: the reason the cause of
the bees decline was so hard to solve is that there were a hundred
perpetrators.  

A doctor's least favorite patient is the one with such a complicated medical
picture she can't help the patient, no one can.  Even House is stumped.  The
patient takes a pile of prescribed medications, eats vitamins and Chinese
herbs by the handful, has a weird diet misguided by a number of internet fad
notions which are contradictory and contain both known and unknown harmful
interactions, smokes heavily, drinks heavily, eats too much, never exercises
and does recreational pharmaceuticals, keeps an irregular schedule and lies
about what he is ingesting, doesn't even know every herb and drug he takes
even when he tells the truth about it.  Clearly the patient is declining
rapidly, but the doctors can do little about it, because the picture is so
complicated, it is impossible to tell which habit is killing him the
fastest.

The honeybee is the bug equivalent of the complicated patient.  Too many
inputs, some of them unknown, the collective effect clearly harmful and
possibly fatal to both the patient and her dependents.  

Imagine the above patient who gives up smoking but continues to decline.  He
comes back to the doctor and says "See there, smoking wasn't causing the
problems.  May I go back to smoking now?"  

Prediction: the USA will get a ban on neonicotinoids which will likely help,
but the bees will still decline from a wildly complicated combination of
other factors, creating a huge debate on whether the neonics were
contributing to the decline.