One thing I've realized about this site are the insane amount of software engineers that have a disdain for the medical field. It comes up all the time deeper into comment threads where people say medical school entrance exams being so hard is a form of "gatekeeping" - which it is, on purpose, but they're using it as a pejorative to tell themselves "I could've been a doctor too if they didn't make it so purposefully hard."
The other very very disturbing trend are the "makers" who denigrate medical devices as overly complex. One thread I'll never get over was on old pacemakers. The prevailing sentiment was they're designed for failure because "evil medical industry profit", not that, you know, they wear out.
The other part felt like watching the theory of memetics demonstrate itself in real-time. One person commented that the single small mechanical component is rated to actuate 5,000,000 times or something like that. Someone dismissively said "Well yeah but Adafruit keyboard switches are rated at 2-3 million presses, they mass-produce them, thus it can't be that hard" (adafruit's data sheet says 1,000,000 btw). Very quickly, people picked up that line and repeated that the actuator in a pacemaker isn't "actually that complicated", citing the 2-3 million keycap example. I still see that keycap "argument" pop up all the time.
BTW: Pacemakers are actually rated for about 100,000,000 stimuli cycles.
I wanted to write a very similar comment, except about cosmology instead of medicine. The amount of people with high school level physics knowledge who think they know better than almost all luminaries of the field combined just because their gut feeling is telling them something about dark matter is astonishing.
I mean I barely know about pacemakers. Just that I have a congenital heart condition and will need one in a decade or so, and have taken a hobbyists interest in learning about them/ following the field. Just the level of arrogance and just completely wrong "facts" astonished me. The bit that moves is a few strands of hair thick. In what world does "I built my own keyboard" translate to "I built my own keyboard so how much different could a pacemaker be?"
The disdain extends to all other fields because they were told software was going to eat the world - they felt like special snowflakes entitled to call everyone else special snowflakes, and it went about as well as you'd expect.
The other very very disturbing trend are the "makers" who denigrate medical devices as overly complex. One thread I'll never get over was on old pacemakers. The prevailing sentiment was they're designed for failure because "evil medical industry profit", not that, you know, they wear out.
The other part felt like watching the theory of memetics demonstrate itself in real-time. One person commented that the single small mechanical component is rated to actuate 5,000,000 times or something like that. Someone dismissively said "Well yeah but Adafruit keyboard switches are rated at 2-3 million presses, they mass-produce them, thus it can't be that hard" (adafruit's data sheet says 1,000,000 btw). Very quickly, people picked up that line and repeated that the actuator in a pacemaker isn't "actually that complicated", citing the 2-3 million keycap example. I still see that keycap "argument" pop up all the time.
BTW: Pacemakers are actually rated for about 100,000,000 stimuli cycles.