> It's the same in any profession. I worked at Geek Squad during college. Someone comes in 30 times because "my computers feels a little slow", we've ran every test we can think of, and nothing is wrong. In that case I'm going to place the blame on either user perception--this specific customer has unreasonable expectations about what is slow and fast. Or there's a minor non-serious issue with his computer that no one is likely to be able to diagnose without doing something seriously invasive that is likely to cause more harm than the issue.
I would hope a medical professional has some baselines to compare against unlike your methodology at Geek Squad.
You could have ran benchmarks, found a machine with identical hardware, etc.
IMO, in both of these cases (medical and geek squad) there are issues with diagnostic methodology.
>You could have ran benchmarks, found a machine with identical hardware, etc.
1. In similar cases I couldn't find a machine with identical hardware to a 5 year old computer without spending way more money than this was worth.
Even if I did the only way to get an accurate comparison would be to wipe both machine and install an OS from scratch so that they are running the same software--the customer doesn't want us to do such an invasive procedure.
Extrapolate both of those problems to actual humans and you'll see the issues here.
2. Almost all of his complaints are subjective and impossible to objectively measure. We have no way to objectively measure things like feeling fatigue and pain.
Computers have the option of a replacement hardware where humans do not. Perhaps to tweak the analogy and suggest the computer is specialist hardware running software designed for it that runs a stupidly expensive CNC made by a company that no longer exists. That changes the equation such that spending more than the computer hardware is worth is now worthwhile.
And 2. If you have chronic fatigue it’s nothing like fatigue a healthy person would experience - it’s next level. There were some thoughts to change the name to mild paralysis because sometimes you can be so fatigued that you literally cannot move.
There are objective ways to measure it. Post Exertional Malaise has a number of tests, two day max exertion test for one. There are also immuno assays which are pretty definitive. You can take plasma from someone with ME/CFS introduce healthy white blood cells, expose it to a salt water stress test and measure how quick the cells run out of energy and the results are definitive here too. Hard to fake that.
As for the subjectivity, when looking at post viral fatigue there seems to be 3 categories of people; 1 people who appear to be incapable of getting post viral fatigue, they'd die before reaching some threshold which suggests that there is a genetic aspect to susceptibility. 2 people who grew up with a progressive ME/CFS who are highly susceptive to post viral fatigue but consider the fatigue within their normal experience. 3 people who don't have ME/CFS but are at least partially susceptible, specially with Covid, and anecdotal accounts of their experience tends to have a common thread of never had experienced that level of fatigue before in their entire lives.
The author never used the term chronic fatigue. Maybe they had such severe fatigue they couldn't move, but there's no reason to think this his the case.
As for Post Exertional Malaise, again maybe this was a complaint of theirs, but they only mentioned slow recovery times.
If their symptoms are severe, they're really underselling them with their descriptions.
>That changes the equation such that spending more than the computer hardware is worth is now worthwhile.
The worthwhile point of that particular analogy is comparing invasive procedures. Doing invasive procedures like wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the OS vs non invasive testing.
You get to a point where invasive testing is only worthwhile if the symptoms are severe enough because of the risks involved in invasive procedures.
I was talking in generalities beyond the original reddit author.
I would not call a PEM test invasive but I would consider it likely damaging and wouldn't recommend in general. A blood draw is hardly invasive and there is absolutely no reason why the tests cannot be cheap. Like $5 cheap - far cheaper than the $100K this person already spent.
Another option when you do want to compare computers, or if you suspect the OS is the problem, is to boot a live cd/usb of some Linux distro and do some benchmarking or stress testing there.
I didn't mean to trigger a defense, but I don't think you are considering all the possibilities.
> Even if I did the only way to get an accurate comparison would be to wipe both machine and install an OS from scratch so that they are running the same software--the customer doesn't want us to do such an invasive procedure.
You don't need to do any of that if you run benchmarks against averages. For example, PassMark or Geekbench are decent tools for assessing expected performance.
When I said "we ran every test we can think of" I meant we ran every test we could think of. Benchmarks were part of every standard diagnosis, not just the weird cases.
The problem with extrapolating this to humans is that benchmarks for people are wildly variable.
Given the specific nature of the authors complaints, I can almost guarantee that he underwent some standard benchmark tests.
> In similar cases I couldn't find a machine with identical hardware to a 5 year old computer without spending way more money than this was worth.
> Even if I did the only way to get an accurate comparison would be to wipe both machine and install an OS from scratch so that they are running the same software--the customer doesn't want us to do such an invasive procedure.
Then you said:
> Benchmarks were part of every standard diagnosis, not just the weird cases.
So, you had a base objective measure, so why did you say that you could only measure it if you had a clean computer? You could install a fresh hard drive, boot into a PE and demonstrate to the customer its not slow, etc, so many things.
And then:
> Of course, but the entire point of that story is that people can have different subjective experiences of the same objective truth.
I am not trying to be a dick, but it seems more like the story was contrived to give your analogy some armor.
>So, you had a base objective measure, so why did you say that you could only measure it if you had a clean computer? You could install a fresh hard drive, boot into a PE and demonstrate to the customer its not slow, etc, so many things.
Because I didn't realize when you said "You could have ran benchmarks, found a machine with identical hardware, etc."
That you were talking about 2 separate things. I thought you were saying I could have ran benchmarks on this computer and compared to the benchmarks on an identical computer.
>I am not trying to be a dick, but it seems more like the story was contrived to give your analogy some armor.
There was no one single story. I saw plenty of cases like that. The contrived part was that they came in 30 times--that was exaggerated to match the number of cases in the original post. The kind of people who bring their computers into Geek Squad general don't care about objective measurement. They care about their subjective experience of whether this computer feels fast or not.
Sometimes it feels slower than it did when it was new for a real reason that isn't fixable--the OS was upgraded and some of the interactions feel slower even though the synthetic benchmarks are the same. The software they are running now has been bloated over the last 5 years by new features etc...
Sometimes it's some weird combination of stuff that you're never going to see unless you sit and watch them for a whole day. Sometimes it's stuff they'd never do while you're watching like opening 10 different porn videos at a time.
But the point is it's an analogy. It doesn't matter if it actually happened or not. It's designed to make a comparison to the original problem but in a domain that more people here will have had experience with--diagnosing computer problems vs being a doctor.
I would hope a medical professional has some baselines to compare against unlike your methodology at Geek Squad.
You could have ran benchmarks, found a machine with identical hardware, etc.
IMO, in both of these cases (medical and geek squad) there are issues with diagnostic methodology.