A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking
Exposing healthy people to full-body MRIs to screen for cancers might seem excessive, but it reduces risk about as much as not smoking for a year.
I am cooking up two more SICP-inspired Haskell articles which will be about ways of performing side effects for a digital circuit simulation. But they're not yet ready, so in the meantime, here's a way to look at an analysis from Scott Alexander that makes its result more intuitive.
A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking
Apparently having otherwise-healthy people go through a full-body MRI to screen for cancers saves about 0.025 QALYs. But I have no idea what that should mean for me, so we perform a dirty conversion where 1 QALY = 37,000 micromorts and then we can compare to other activities with similar risk levels.
Full article (2–5 minute read): A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking
Flashcard of the week
From Working Backwards, which describes how some things are done at AWS.
What are the two purposes of job descriptions?
Worth keeping in mind when trying to remember the answer to this one that Amazon is a huge company, so the hiring process goes through many layers of bureaucracy.
Market the role, and guide the interviewer in what questions they need to ask.
The job description typically comes from the hiring manager, and that's one of very few ways they're allowed to have input on the job posting, so that's where they need to think about what they can write that will attract the right sort of candidate.
Additionally, the interviewers may not have any connection to the hiring manager (because they assess for general Amazon fit, not this specific role) so they need to learn what sort of questions they should ask somewhere, and the job description should be a match for the right type of questions, too.
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