The Claude Delusion

Semmelweis the tormented handwashing genius is a myth in the same way that 'Columbus discovered the Earth is round' is a myth. Both people believed something totally and obviously false, but later writers in search of a martyr projected a different (and modern) belief upon them to make a better story.

Semmelweis' actual belief was "childbed fever is caused exclusively by corpse pieces getting into women, and therefore is only spread by doctors who do dissections before treating women, therefore handwashing with lye will remove those corpse particles.'

Other doctors asked the obvious questions

Question A) So are you saying that childbed fever is a contagious disease, like smallpox?

Semmelweis answer (verbatim): "Childbed fever is not a contagious disease. A contagious disease is one that produces the contagion by which the disease is spread. This contagion rings about only the same disease in other individuals ... smallpox causes only smallpox and no other disease... childbed fever is different."

Question B) Why do we see this disease at the same rates at hospitals that do dissections as the ones that don't do dissections?

Semmelweis answer: - None found -

Question C) Can you show us your data on incidence rates? It is well known that childbed fever appears in rare outbreaks of many cases, with long intervals between when they happen, so we need a fairly long time period to show that the intervention has an effect instead of just starting your intervention after an outbreak and noticing one of the lull periods.

Semmelweis answer: Total silence for fourteen years, not publishing or sharing his data.

14 years later, when Semmelweis publishes again, it turns out that his handwashing ward had an outbreak of childbed fever, showing the intervention didn't prevent outbreaks.

Question D) So, your handwashing method didn't prevent outbreaks, and you've said that childbed fever is only spread by corpse particles from dissections. Why do we see the disease at the same rate in your hospitals before and after intervention.

Semmelweis answer: Well, when I said 'cadaverous particles', I didn't mean actually particles from corpses, obviously you can produce these corpse particles inside living people. Why, there was a lady with uterine cancer on the same floor of my clinic as those poor women who got childbed fever. That cancer produced corpse particles inside her body and they got out somehow and that made the other women in the hospital sick. The same goes for all those other non-dissecting hospitals you asked about earlier!

Now, should Semmelweis get partial credit for coming up with an ineffective treatment based on a batshit and wrong medical theory, because he was at least the first person to suggest regular handwashing?

No. Semmelweis was late to the punch. James Young Simpson suggested handwashing as regular practice ten years earlier.

Simpson is also known for being the first person to publish about using chloroform as an anesthetic in humans, and use anesthesia in obstetrics, and his discovery of chloroform as a useful medical drug was based on sitting around a table with his friends and huffing random chemicals until they found a good one ( https://books.google.com/books... ). A much better research scientist overall, and - realizing that some people were already citing religious objections to taking away pain on moral grounds - he preemptively lead with a huge PR push to make sure anesthetics had the upper hand in the debate.

Simpson's PR push utterly crushed any objections, and was absurdly successful, to the point where some later historians thought he might have been trying to drum up controversy by falsely claiming that there were people stupid enough to object to so obviously useful a drug. I think given current circumstances we can see that Simpson was well-founded in assuming he had to get ahead of antidrug sentiment and keep pushing.

>Nobody should give a shit what a bunch of thieves think about piracy.

Yes, but sadly the MPA and RIAA have enough power that they make the news anyway.

Guy Fieri is totally innocent and a great guy, but because of his hair everyone assumes he's the worst of the lot.

The english translation was 1923, so everyone cited that as the origin date.

However, the title was translated in 1920 before the rest of RUR.

>You should. Here's the list of 69 cent specials today:

Nice

>Is the lowest common denominator really *this* low?

One of their flagship shows is 'Dr. Zit Popper'.

You be the judge.

Conversion metrics were being gamed. For instance, one of the companies Uber had doing ads for them installed malware in free battery monitor apps that would convert searches for 'uber' into fake ad clicks, so they'd count as conversions.

Differences in a slashdot post's formative history are critical, BeauHD said, because the conditions under which a post is submitted and the edits it has undergone "are far more informative than the mere fact that a post qualifies as a dupe."

>As I understand it, they're exploiting arbitrage opportunities ("pork bellies are selling in New York for $1/pound, in Chicago for $1.00001 per pound, buy in NY and sell in Chicago but only for the next 0.01 seconds!")

They also can run in front of normal traders, and apply a variety of methods to sniff preferences.

In a very rough simplification, let's say someone wants to buy pork. They execute a buy order for pork, which is basically 'buy it if it's 1.04 or lower'. Someone currently on the market is selling pork for $1.00. The HFT can sniff the buyer's order, immediately buy the pork from the seller for $1.00, raise the price to 1.04 and execute the transaction with the buyer.

Without the HFT the buyer would just get it for $1.00

One of the major suspects for creeping shittiness in web interfaces is automated A/B testing. Some metric is chosen as a proxy for how good the UI is, then a robot makes tiny tweaks to the UI until that metric changes to a different number.

You've probably seen one of these big automated A/B design 'successes' if you've browsed without an adblocker for any period of time. The situation where the ad takes just a LITTLE longer to load than the rest of the page, and manages to load at just the wrong time to intercept a click? That's the type of solution you evolve when you automate a ton of tiny little changes to a website. And in terms of the metric they're optimizing for - ad clicks - it works amazingly.

or possibly

"I am not afraid because I know that my new life is death. Life will be an easy one in paradise."

I mean compare against people who got paid off to spy on their own country

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

You can convince people to turn traitor for surprisingly little.

Dang that's gotta be a couple tons at least

Unlike 'lesser' journals Nature needs huge amounts of money, because while their fixed costs are identical, Nature gets the most prestigious authors and reviewers. These workers of course command extremely high pay, justifying the markup, right?