←
→
eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (cyhmn)
Add MemoryShare This Entry

QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:24am on 2019-01-04

"Adaptation requires two things: mutation and selection. Mutation produces variety and deviation; selection kills off the least functional mutations. Our old, craft-based, pre-computer system of professional practice-in medicine and in other fields-was all mutation and no selection. There was plenty of room for individuals to do things differently from the norm; everyone could be an innovator. But there was no real mechanism for weeding out bad ideas or practices.

"Computerization, by contrast, is all selection and no mutation. Leaders install a monolith, and the smallest changes require a committee decision, plus weeks of testing and debugging to make sure that fixing the daylight-saving-time problem, say, doesn't wreck some other, distant part of the system."

-- Atul Gawande, "Why Doctors Hate Their Computers", The New Yorker, 2018-11-12 thanks to [info] - personal siderea for linking to this)

[Merry eleventh day of Christmas!]

←
→
There are 2 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
minoanmiss: A detail of the Ladies in Blue fresco (Default)

*

posted by [personal profile] minoanmiss at 11:01pm on 2019-01-04
*makes note*
[link] [reply]
flwyd: (java logo)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] flwyd at 05:34pm on 2019-01-27
I think this is reflective of a different adaptive process. Software in the medical industry has been selected for, among others criteria, compliance with specifications—medical (e.g. specified tolerance for a blood pressure monitor), regulatory (e.g. HIPAA compliance), and procedural (e.g. coding that matches expectations of several different insurance systems). These selective pressures are driven by both rules that medical institutions have to follow and the market dynamics of sales in the medical industry, which involve large and conservative institutions making large purchasing decisions.

Software in other markets, like social networking or computer games, evolved in an environment with very different selective pressures. This kind of software is much more mutative, and for good reason: it's very unlikely that someone will die because of a bug introduced in a website-wide redesign or a glitch in a patch to a computer game.
[link] [reply]

Links

January

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1
1
 2
1
 3
1
 4
1
 5
1
 6
1
 7
1
8
1
 9
1
 10
1
 11
1
 12
1
 13
1
 14
1
15
1
 16
1
 17
1
 18
1
 19
1
 20
1
 21
1
22
1
 23
1
 24
 
 25
 
 26
 
 27
 
 28
 
29
 
 30
 
 31