The Fate Trump Spared Us

Why despite my visceral dislike and low opinion of Trump, I’m still glad she lost:

I am sure Obama always remained ambivalent about Hillary Clinton from their 2008 contest, as he was very critical of Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in The Audacity of Hope. Then, too, we know that Hillary’s 2008 campaign was an organizational disaster from start to finish, reflecting her own disorderly mind, arrogant manner, and presumptuous character. It appears she learned nothing from that experience as the campaign approached.

Yes. As I’ve always said, she’s an incompetent, corrupt hack, and her administration would have been a disaster on top of terrible policy.

[Update late morning]

Hillary ran the worst presidential campaign ever. And there’s no reason to think that she’d have run the country any better.

AI In Medicine

Self-taught systems beat MDs at predicting heart attacks:

All four AI methods performed significantly better than the ACC/AHA guidelines. Using a statistic called AUC (in which a score of 1.0 signifies 100% accuracy), the ACC/AHA guidelines hit 0.728. The four new methods ranged from 0.745 to 0.764, Weng’s team reports this month in PLOS ONE. The best one—neural networks—correctly predicted 7.6% more events than the ACC/AHA method, and it raised 1.6% fewer false alarms. In the test sample of about 83,000 records, that amounts to 355 additional patients whose lives could have been saved. That’s because prediction often leads to prevention, Weng says, through cholesterol-lowering medication or changes in diet.

To be honest, while it’s statistically significant, I’d have expected a bigger improvement than that. And it’s not clear how useful it is if the recommendations aren’t science based, as prescribing cholesterol-reduction or diet change generally aren’t.

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