vrperson's comments

But will health care providers adjust to your insurance?

Here in Germany, you get treated differently in some places if you have private insurance. I have actually avoided private insurance because I worried about too many unnecessary treatments (not sure if that was a good trade off - maybe if one day I'll get seriously ill, I'll regret that choice).

A bit annoying is that often the doctors won't even tell you that they are not suggesting a certain treatment because it wouldn't be covered by public insurance.

But what I mean is, possibly your treatment will somehow get cheaper once you are in the second stage of your insurance plan?

I never managed to use Anki for long. Maybe the interface is just too clunky.

Sets that can be downloaded are also often low quality, or at least there is no way to tell in advance.

I think some day there may be a unicorn startup doing the flash card thing right.

Are you sure the US health care system delivers less care? I've read data about the health of the nation which seems bad compared to other countries (in relation to wealth). But I don't think that is automatically the fault of bad care. For example, if cheap access to food and cars make people fat, leading to bad health outcomes, it would not be the fault of the health care system.

It could be even worse, and a better health care system could make people be more careless about their health, because they would rely on being treated well enough to survive anyway.

Not saying any of that is the actual case, just that there are many aspects to consider.

As for controlling rent seeking behavior, wouldn't the insurance companies be interested in paying less? I don't see how private insurance facilitates uncontrolled rent seeking behavior?

It is very much a problem with public insurance, when patients never even see the bills.

In general, health insurance is a hard problem.

But if you are insured, does it matter how expensive it is?

Here in Germany we have public insurance and private insurance. If you have private insurance, you pay for health care yourself and then get the money back from the insurer later on. So you see what is actually being charged, and it is expensive.

If you are on public insurance, you never even see the bills. Often the private insurance actually has to pay for the public insurance, as health care businesses would be unable to survive without the extra money from the private insurance people.

Maybe if you see the bills because you are privately insured, they seem expensive. But perhaps they just reflect the actual real costs.

Isn't the same strategy of looking for anecdotes of people with bad experiences used to deceive people about the US health care system?

I don't live in the US, so I have no way of knowing what is the real experience.

You should occasionally fact check the fact checkers. There are no real fact checkers, that is just a self assigned marketing label that some journalists or media outlets have assigned to themselves. Once you have caught them doing it wrong several times, you may understand.

As for looking critical at studies: the article didn't look critically at the studies they cited.

The article being "straightforward": the problem is that it all sounds plausible, so readers are less likely to question the details.

The article seems to be all over the place and mixes interesting phenomena like human biases and fallacies with pure speculation, like claiming "bots can easily ruin social networks" which they infer from merely running simulations. Obviously their simulation doesn't prove anything about the nature of networks of real humans (as one example).

Afaik their Botometer tool is also highly disputed, supposedly having way too many false positives.

They also use supposed "independent fact checkers" for reference, when those "independent fact checkers" on Facebook and Twitter are decidedly left leaning. This in turn casts doubt on their conclusions on the differences between Democrats and Republicans (for example something like Republicans are more likely to believe fake news as verified by independent fact checkers - or maybe left leaning fact checkers are more likely to label "conservative news" as fake news).

Ironically, the whole article is too long to comment on it all, kind of supporting the title of it (information overload helps spread fake news).

I find it very concerning how people start to overly rely on "studies". It really needs to become common knowledge that a "study of this" or a "study of that" really doesn't prove anything just yet. Those studies need to be scrutinized and verified and replicated, and properly interpreted.

By that logic there is nothing useful you could say to a depressed person, as they won't get out of bed anyway.

I am willing to believe that there are people who won't feel better by going for a run or will be unable to do so, but I think there are probably also people who feel better by simply doing it, even if they don't feel like it.

Especially with depression there also seems to be an ideological battle, were some people absolutely want to believe that it is caused by chemical imbalances and medication is the only thing that can possibly work. (Again, I am willing to believe that such cases exist, but I also think there are people who would rightfully have been classified as depressed who came out of it without medication).

So far, targeted ads don't really seem to work that well (studies have found). I don't think getting the size of my rooms will be that much of an improvement. They can infer maybe how much money I have, but they can probably already guess that from my address and my credit card company also knows. It's not even clear that the data about my rooms is transferred to Facebook.

I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.

What I don't get is, why does Facebook want me to have a single friends list, under my real name?

I don't mind having an account with Facebook. I already have an Oculus account, and I add "Oculus friends" there, so I assume Facebook can get all my data from there, anyway (including my real name, as I added my credit card to be able to buy games).

But I find I mind having to befriend my gaming friends on Facebook, as I may share different content there.

In fact, if Facebook wants to become the ultimate social network, shouldn't they somehow offer better tools to manage different social circles? (Work, Family, Gaming, Sports, Politics...).

I don't think their play is to get my Oculus data to make better targeted ads. They already have that data.

What I could imagine is that the future of social networking will be in VR worlds, and since they want to dominate social networking, that's their power grab (they also work on a virtual world for that, Horizons).

But it seems to me their "friendship management tools" are not up to the task yet. I've never digged deeply into their controls, but it shouldn't be complicated.

It's not a new concept, either - weren't there "circles" in some network (Google+?). But it didn't work out. So instead of forcing this VR merge, perhaps they should focus on solving the circles problem first?