The author should tread carefully... I think the crisis of irreproducibility and the publishing bubble extends to the heart of scientific disciplines as well.
Like a lot of things in life, reality is probably more complex than the postmodern humanities scholars or the realist scientific scholars would suggest. There is some level of reality underlying discourse, but it's also filtered through social processes at every step.
One might argue that a more practically consequential question is what happens when this same argument gets extended to achievement tests, or admission tests, such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, or LSAT?
The problem is US health care providers are immune to true competition:
1. They often enjoy state-sanctioned monopolies in the form of overly restrictive licensing laws. They're basically unions that enshrine certain false assumptions about what form of training is necessary to accomplish tasks.
2. They don't even have to be held to any cost agreements.
How can you have competition or any kind of viable health care economy when no one actually knows the price of a service until it is set by the provider after the fact, and there is no way of offering an alternative means of offering the service?
It's absurd. I don't even understand how most of this is legal. The price should be set beforehand, or at least there should be an estimate on request, and the final price should be with in a small fraction of that estimate, and licensing should be dramatically loosened or eliminated, to allow providers who are competent but have alternate educational paths (e.g., optometrists expanding their practice, or psychologists prescribing, or nurses or pharmacists increasing their role).
This talk makes perfect sense if you know a bit about Steele's recent research history.
It was a main focus of Fortress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language...), for example, which was interesting but never quite got off the ground in the same way as other competitors, in part because of the focus on notation implementation.
If anything, my experience following Fortress led me to believe what Steele was discussing in his talk is both a tremendous opportunity but also much more difficult than the impression he creates.
For what it's worth, I thought the talk was really interesting and I would like to see it taken more seriously, if not as an immediate goal, then a long-term one.
Like a lot of things in life, reality is probably more complex than the postmodern humanities scholars or the realist scientific scholars would suggest. There is some level of reality underlying discourse, but it's also filtered through social processes at every step.