>what do you want?
Mostly wanted to describe what has been tried before so that maybe someone else can try something smarter in the future. There’s so many misaligned incentives and problems that it’s hard to know where to start and it’s nice to have a place to put these thoughts down in a productive manner.
I guess I was looking for emotional support and got it; thank you. I imagine that my emotions have similarities to that of people who work on friendly AI.
There’s not much else to say that isn’t said better elsewhere (woes of American healthcare, coordination problems, the LW sequences, the way brains think of other people, utilions, heroic responsibility, ambiguous delegation of duties, dissemination and usage of knowledge, etc.).
In closing, a passage from chapter 109 of HPMOR feels appropriate.
The aspect I found interesting was that … the rest of Atlantis ignored this project and went upon their ways. It was sometimes praised as a noble public endeavor, but nearly all other Atlanteans found more important things to do on any given day than help. … With relatively little support, the tiny handful of would-be makers of this device labored under working conditions that were not so much dramatically arduous, as pointlessly annoying. Eventually time ran out and Atlantis was destroyed with the device still far from complete.
I’m quite fascinated by this post because I work for a company that spent a chunk of its startup years trying to implement the “Early Detection Center” part using 911 calls and call-related data.
From listening to the early folks, I got the impression that “terrorism! biosurveillance!” made for nice press conferences. But, people are mostly interested only if we help their highly-visible and much more obvious key performance indicators improve (e.g. increasing revenue). Even after getting certified (?) by the US Department of Homeland Security as a syndromic surveillance system, we continue to spend almost all our time on everything everything but syndromic surveillance.
As a publicly visible example of the company’s change, you can go to https://firstwatch.net/what-we-do/ and see that part of our business is only 1 tile (“Public Health”) out of 5.
Maybe someone can learn from our experiences and find a way to persuade people to take it seriously in the future.