All of Zian's Comments + Replies

The Ralphs (aka The Kroger Company) and Vons (aka Albertsons Companies, Inc.) supermarket chains allow you to direct some money to a charity of your choosing.  Traditionally, that meant you could donate to a school district.

While the current list of charities isn't great, I was able to find a review of KIPP at GiveWell so I send the money their way.

>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, coord... (read more)

without this funding

The original post by the two authors talked about getting effective monitoring/surveillance.

The status quo is what the planet has with the current funding, etc. If you want something better, then as you inferred, it's going to take additional changes and resources.

In the Less Wrong sequences, there are essays about utilions and warm fuzzies. In the healthcare world, that distinction is always present.

If I spend $80,000 hiring someone to slog through medical records looking for a pandemic, then I have given up the chance to spend $80,000... (read more)

You're correct except that we receive money from other types of organizations too, including non-profit organizations who give money in the form of grants (hi there, American Heart Association!). You'll see why later in this comment.

The firm has international ambitions but it is an American company with an office in California.

>buy data at a loss?

Not quite that cheap. You can think of it as 'Insert coins. Get a table of data about people in trouble.' More specifically, we charge people for each data source they want us to look at.

 The most common t... (read more)

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 syndromi... (read more)