Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

“Typically the most important thing is not how you do the optimization but rather what you decide to optimize." This is in regards to a school bus route optimization disaster:

The program — developed by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — uses artificial intelligence to generate the routes with the intent of reducing the number of routes. Last year, JCPS had 730 routes last year, and that was cut to 600 beginning this year…

So, people thought you could eliminate — pardon, optimize — 20% of the routes without consequence. Don’t blame AI, which is nothing but an incantation used to make someone’s magical thinking a reality.

Three pieces from last week about the long-gone, the recently deceased, and the actively dying:

• Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
• The Year Twitter Died
• Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images people think are real

What a great year for the Internet!

(ᔥWaxy.org)

I wish there was a way to see what a post would look like in the micro.blog timeline when posting from MarsEdit. The Title field popping up is a hint that the post may or may not be truncated, but it’s not fool-proof. My first post for today was an example of a fool messing it up!

And while we are at it: being able to see the word count ± choose categories in the MarsEdit micropost window would be wonderful. This very post, which started in the micropost window, is the case study for why.

For Malaysia Airlines, 2014 was a devastating year. I remember flight MH17, which was shot down on July 17 while flying over eastern Ukraine. But months before, another flight — MH370 — disappeared from the radar never to be seen again (well, not intact). A friend directed me to this video, and the story is as engrossing as anything you’ll see on the big screen, only done with flight simulator software and stock footage. Make sure you can spare the full hour before you start watching!

Side note: it’s a good documentary, but Good lord how I hate YouTube’s aesthetics of catchy titles and eye-grabbing thumbnail videos. At least they’ve fixed the comments.

The original World of Goo was one of the first games in my ever-expanding Steam library. I can’t wait to play the sequel on the Apple Vision Pro! (ᔥWaxy.org)

Seeing the news about a woman, two mirrors, and an iPhone photo, the first word that comes to mind — rightly or wrongly — is fabulist. When an attention-seeking person wants to engage a scandal-seeking public, of course that they will target Apple. I am old enough to remember people making a show out of the whole thing. (↬Matt Birchler)

The word of the day (and it’s 11:45pm where I am, so it is the Word of the Day) is fecosystem, courtesy of Doc Searls:

Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in that vast data river delta, but all of them play parts in a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online.

Minority Report takes place in 2054, but 30 years is way too long for us to reach those levels of privacy invasion when we are already nearly there.

The winner of this year’s Interactive Fiction Comp is the delightful Dr. Ludwig and the Devil. Browsing the winners of years past gave me a few flashbacks from the early 2000s, my peak years of IF gaming; these two in particular. (ᔥwaxy.org)

I just finished attending a 1-hour career panel for UMBC undergrads thinking about medical school, and the one thing anyone interested in practicing medicine in America should know is that you really, really, really need to know how to answer multiple choice questions. It doesn’t matter how smart, knowledgable, or hard-working you are: if you don’t have the skills needed to pick the one correct answer out of the four to six usually given, be ready to take a hit on how, where, and whether at all you can practice medicine in the US.

To be clear, this is a condemnation of the current system! Yes, there are always tradeoffs: oral exams so prevalent in my own medical school in Serbia weight against the socially awkward and those who second-guessed themselves. But the MCQs are so pervasive in every aspect of evaluating doctors-to-be (and practicing physicians!) that you have to wonder about all the ways seen and unseen in which Goodhart’s law is affecting healthcare.

What would the ideal evaluation of medical students look like? It wouldn’t rely on a single method, for one. Or, to be more precise, it wouldn’t make a single method the only one that mattered. Whether it’s the MCAT to get into medical school, USMLE to get into residency and fellowship, or board exams to get and maintain certification, it is always the same method for the majority of (sub)specialties. Different organizations, at different levels of medical education, zeroing in on the same method could indeed mean that the method is really good — see: carcinisation — ⊕ To save you a click: it is “a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan”, as per Wikipedia. In other words, the crab-like body plan is so good that it evolved at least five different times. but then if it is so great to be shaped like a crab, where are our crab-like overlords?

Being a crab is a great solution for a beach-dwelling predatory crustacean with no great ambitions, and MCQs are a great solution to quickly triage the abysmal from everyone else when you are pressed for resources and time. But, both could also be signs of giving up on life, like how moving to your parents' basement is the convergence point for many different kinds of failed ambition.

Behind the overuse of MCQs is the urge to rank. Which, mind you, is not why tests like USMLE were created. They were, much like the IQ tests, meant to triage the low-performing students from the others. But the tests spits out a number, and since a higher number is by definition, well, higher than the lower ones, the ranking began, and with it the Goodhartization of medical education. The ranking became especially useful as every step of the process became more competitive and the programs started getting drowned in thousands of applications, all with different kinds of transcripts, personal statements, and letters of recommendation. The golden thread tying them all together, the one component to rule them all, was the number they all shared — the USMLE score.

But then the programs started competing for the same limited pool of good test-takers, neglecting the particulars of why a lower-scoring candidate may actually be a better match for their program. Bad experience all around, unlike you are good at taking tests, in which case good for you, but also look up bear favor. On the other hand, there is all this other information — words, not numbers — that gets misused or ignored. If only there was a way for medical schools and residency programs to analyze the applications of students/residents that they found successful by whatever metric and make a tailor-made prediction engine.

Which is kind of like what machine learning is, and it was such a logical thing to do that of course people tried it, several times, with mixed success. It was encouraging to see that two of these three papers were published in Academic Medicine, which is AAMCs own journal. One can only hope that this will lead to a multitude of different methods of analysis, a thousand flowers blooming, etc. The alternative — one algorithm to rule them all — could be as bad as USMLE.

The caveat is that Americans are litigious. Algorithmic hiring has already raised some alarm, so I can readily imagine the first lawsuit from an unmatched but well-moneyed candidate complaining about no human laying their eyes on the application. But if that’s the worst thing that could happen, it’s well-worth trying.