this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Public Health
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“Well, fair enough, but we already know the miasma caused by fetid odors is what causes illness, not to mention the spontaneous generation causing all sorts of parasites to rise from the dust” -some guy in 1256
I’m not trying to be mean to you, but this type of subject and analysis is just at a different kind of “level” of research than the very basic cause-> effect observational type of science. We can isolate out factors you’ve mentioned (such as air quality, diet, etc) and still look around at purely built environment factors and see how much it impacts health. “We’ve run the numbers and determined that having a sidewalk outside of your house lowers your lifetime health expenditures by $1230, and we can extrapolate that data to give to cities so they can make better decisions on how they plan housing areas” is a pretty huge ability to have. And that’s an “obvious” kind of result! Maybe they find a correlation between having a biodeverse lawn and longevity/health! We simply do not know, and this tech lets us get a bit closer.
Using AI to conjure correlations out of data seems more like speculating about miasma and dust parasites to me. I suppose if we can drill down from the wealth of correlations we generate to find something actually useful, that's potential, but good lord the examples in the article are not inspiring. I think if anything, the potential here is identifying problem areas and targeting solutions at them, something that actual people have to do currently, rather than establishing any link between built environment and heart disease that we don't already understand, because, you know, it's not 1256 anymore.
I just don’t really think that this is your field
It's precisely because this is my field (public built environments) that I'm so skeptical of claims based on dubious statistical relationships. I'm willing to be convinced, of course, but if you had to go into a meeting with public officials and make suggestions, these are the sorts of questions you should be expecting. I am not convinced by the public health angle, so far, anyway.