What I’ve been doing for the #COVID19 crisis this past few weeks is compiling information. Literature review, compilation of existing efforts, and some coordination/outreach/technical writing work for a project to build & donate low-cost non-invasive ventilators.
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Most attempts to draw conclusions about what should be done, even by very smart people, don’t even attempt to pull up all the relevant evidence that a person with Google could find in a day or two of focused work.
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I don’t know a word for the thing I do. I’m not a doctor; I’m not a nurse; I’m not an engineer. I’m a...writer?
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But I do think what I do is worth doing and not being done adequately by default. People taking action to help with the crisis need information to guide their decisions. And not a flood of popcorn news articles, but something more comprehensive aggregating info.
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I’m tooting my own horn a bit because I think the info-aggregation thing I do needs to become bigger than just “Sarah blog posts” and it needs a name & recognition.
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For example, The Atlantic has done something really valuable that I think goes in this category: compiled all the reports of US COVID19 cases, scattered in local news articles and press releases, into a single dataset with a heatmap of US cases.
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It seems that when you get “hey this info is scattered, let’s put it all together”, software engineers spring into action when it’s a process you can automate...and ALMOST NOBODY BUT ME DOES when it has to be done manually.
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Surely there are NEETs out there who read fast and like spreadsheets! This is your moment!!
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There are many things my method won't help with. I research things from behind a computer screen. My analyses won't include info that's proprietary, or tacit knowledge based on clinical or engineering experience. Reading and aggregating existing papers can't invent a vaccine.
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I normally will feel reluctance to do a lit review on a subject where the...natural categories? don't seem like things well captured in written form.
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E.g. surgery is hard to get a handle on this way. There's lots of publications, yes, but if you don't know anatomy in a 3d sense, you won't even know things like "surgery on this part and that part are similar because the parts are close in space."
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Over the years I've developed a sense of when "mere" reading can provide useful information and when it's kind of futile. I'm not naively going "everything can be solved by info aggregation." But I do honestly think *many* things can.
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End of conversation
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