Ischemic Time
I tend to live in an “If, then” loop.
It’s easier and more comfortable. There’s never an end, but you don’t know that. Kind of. It’s a form of procrastination in itself.
A friend called me out on that recently. She said something along the lines of, “You can’t just wait until everything is good to take a chance. Things could go wrong later but that’s ok and you’ll navigate it then.”
In sports betting, this is common. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you hit a long shot, sometimes you get beat ugly (cue the Benny Hill theme song), sometimes you look at the stats and you won in every category except the final outcome.
Essentially, this is what a Master’s degree in Health Informatics gets you. You set a foundation for gathering clean data and making good reports so that people can make focused decisions in critical moments.
Data-driven decisions…
You hear that term a lot nowadays. “Data-driven decisions.” But more importantly than anything else…
Who is the one making the decision? And why do we trust them? If they don’t have a good heart or brain, what does any of that matter?
I gambled my entire life and career on humanity being more important than machines, and if we lose out I guess I’m fucked lol. A famous quote from the Father of Behavioirism B.F. Skinner goes, “The real question is not whether machines think, but whether men do.”
Anyone who’s ever built a report will tell you how the reports we build are based on someone else’s needs and knowledge based on what they think is valuable information.
I can remember working on a project for pediatric cardiac surgeons. The best type of person our world has to offer. They were discussing what values would be important for a dashboard. One of them chimed in:
“How about ischemic time?”
And I thought, What the fuck is that?
(A later Google search returned that: it’s the period during which an organ is not supplied with blood and thus not supplied with oxygen.)
Bringing it back to focus, we don’t arrive at these decisions out of thin air. It takes collaboration, smarts, experience, and a bit of luck.
An old friend of mine said something to me so good like 10 years ago that I wrote it down then. I think about it often. I don’t remember what game he was talking about, but it broadly applied and shaped how I think going forward.
“Hey, there are no locks, no guarantees. We just play percentages. And this, in my opinion, is a high percentage play. I couldn’t take the other side.”
——
Back in 2016 when I was living in NYC, I once met one of my favorite writers. No, not Norm Macdonald (RIP) but that happened too at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.
It was a classic book promo event in Brooklyn. I bought the book Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, which is about the wife of John Quincy Adams. The author Louisa Thomas started writing the book because her own name was not common, and so off she went in her curiosity to understand this other person in human history named Louisa.
I went to get the book signed and had a moment with Louisa Thomas. I anxiously spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d say or ask her. This is how I remember it going.
Me “Hi Louisa, it’s very nice to meet you.”
Louisa “Nice to meet you as well!”
Me “I’m a big fan of Grantland and I love your writing style. The piece you wrote on the Seahawks and Richard Sherman is one of my favorites. There’s just a lot of creativity and joy for life in the words you write.
I guess, not to take up too much of your time since there’s people behind me… when you were writing this book, what’s a broader takeaway you had about life?”
Louisa thought for a few seconds before replying, “That people are driven by emotions, and people are just winging it as they go.”
I never forgot that.