[ExI] right to try bill

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2016 9:19 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] right to try bill

 

>>…A wild shot in the dark is better than dying with unfired ammo, ja?  Spike

 

>…I see one little problem…

 

I see many little problems and several big ones, but not these:

 

>…the list will quickly grow to millions…

 

That is a solution, not a problem.  Or rather a challenge.  Or in the language of business, every problem is an opportunity for excellence.  This is one time when that isn’t just flapping of gums, it really is this time.

 

>…it will take a big website underwritten by Bill Gates or ???? …

 

Ja, it won’t be free, but as projects go, this one shouldn’t be expensive.  We would need a website with plenty of storage (very cheap) some means of database management (not all that expensive even assuming a paid professional staff) and a design team of some sort (just the thing Microsloth or Google does best with their existing staff.)

 

>…A staff of volunteers to run it,and so on…

 

Ja.  What I have in mind is a small core of professional database people, perhaps some research-minded medics, public health grad students from Stanford perhaps who would carry out the initial design phase.  Step one would be to design a structure for the database.

 

A city has a set of metrics which describe its health.  We know it isn’t perfect, but it isn’t useless either.  The metrics we know best are population, income, demographics, school dropout rates, crime stats per capita and so on.  These can be broken down into subcategories, such as the serious stuff (murder, rape, robbery, emailing classified info and so on (kidding bygones, John, geta sensa huma)) then the more misdemeanory stuff, down to ordinary stuff such as jaywalking, speeding and subcontract fraud (John, kidding bygones) but the point is with properly designed stats, one can get a reasonably good picture of the health of a city.  Ja?

 

OK then, we can do the same trick for the health of a prole, but I agree it is likely to be way more complicated, which is why we already have the health metrics for the city, but not the individual people who live there.

 

We need doctors Rafal, to help us imagine or design such a thing, or… I conjecture a lotta work has already been done.  Everything I ever think of, some other yahoo has already thought of it and done it a long time ago, oy vey.  OK, so what is that standardized health descriptor?  Is there currently a way to generate a standardized string of bytes, machine-readable, that describes a person’s health?  What is the name of that standard please, and a site?

 

Psychologists among us, we also need a bunch of metrics to describe the emotional health of the prole, since devouring random medications could have who knows what psychological impact without changing the vital stats.  What do we have already?  If a prole can have several hundred or several thousand descriptors (I don’t think the term ‘metrics’ would really be right for this application, but educate me please, doctors) then my notion is that with current digital technology we can handle several million proles each with a few hundred or even a few thousand health metrics or descriptors.  Ja?  Rafal?  Data hipsters?

 

We can use this system even if most of the metrics are unknown.  I can show you a local example: 23&Me.  There you have a database with over a megaprole, and each had the opportunity to fill out surveys with health questions and link it to the DNA signature.  I did that, and spent a total of not less than about 10 hours.  How much data does that generate?  The genome 23 measures is 6 MB, and I would estimate I generated at least that with health surveys, but somehow Missus Google managed that database (and still does (free to the participants)) which must have been in the terabytes.  Data hipsters please?  Are we there yet?

 

Once we standardize the design, we need can start filling it, even if most of the data is unknown.  This creates what we in the biz might call a sparse matrix, but we have a pile of tools in the statistical toolkit for dealing with sparse matrices and extracting useful information out of them.  Aerospace guys do this sorta thing for fun.  Rather I did.

 

 

>…I DO think it's a good idea.  I don't think any medical people will touch it - lawsuits…

 

The law I hope we get is one which offers immunity to all medics who participate, as advisors, as advocates for some approach, for statisticians who think they see a pattern, for all involved.

 

 

>…What it would be is a giant form of the People's Pharmacy, with everyone who wants to posting their symptoms…

 

Ja, but we still need some means of translating that sea of verbiage into a dataset which our statistical tools can analyze.  See where I am going with that health metric suggestion above?

 

>… soap under my sheets for leg and foot cramps and it WORKS), foreign stem cell treatments…

 

Ja so what kind of data structure would be need to encode soap under the sheets?

 

>… - in short, a big huge holy mess…

 

>From which a big huge holy signal might emerge from the chaos, assuming we figure out how to take advantage of two things we didn’t really have until recently: the means of storing terabytes of information and the CPU horsepower to grind away at it using background computing (unused CPU cycles.)

 

>…Are you volunteering?  Take it to those people who fund nonprofit startups…

 

I am if I knew how the hell to come up with standard database protocol for describing the health of an individual.  I think something like this must have been done already by health insurance companies, ja?

 

>…Go get'em Spike!  bill w

 

I do have something to contribute: my work with systematic comparison of cousin lists from AncestryDNA.  If we can work that in there somehow, I think we can do the next (and better) whack at what Mrs. Google was doing with 23&Me.  We know there are compact data structures which describe family trees.  A lotta this stuff has already been done; we just need to figure out how to bring it together.

 

spike

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