The way this is written, the syncretic allusions to different subject matter, the obsession with Bayes... I feel like I'm a teenager reading LessWrong articles about cognitive biases again. :')
A huge fraction of LessWrong articles are actually about current events politics, but since you can't talk about current events on that website they mainly just allude to it while describing how they think their ideology should apply to interpreting it. (I know they don't consider it an ideology but that's just the word that describes it best.)
People trust what they FEEL good about. If two equally professional looking sources say different things. One says "you are doing something wrong, you will have to change how you think" and the other says "someone else is doing something wrong, you are thinking correctly" then they will trust the second source.
Even when the amount of evidence grows for the first source they will trust the second.
This is especially true if they will lose face for having trusted the second source.
Natural systems are massively complex. We know a lot, but it is still a small fraction. It's right to question things that seem too good to be true. Sometimes that may lead to further discovery about the underlying mechanisms. Although there are plenty of drugs out there that we don't know why they work, we just know that they do.
And on that note, most doctors (that you know personally anyways) will be skeptical of new treatments as they've seen the unintended consequences of previous miracle treatments. Things that have stood the test of time at least give you a better understanding of the potential outcomes.
I agree. I would frame though as even if you are 99.9% certain of something, you can never be so certain as to how important that thing is relative to other things. Often you are certain about something but it turns out to be a minor detail in a bigger game.
You're assuming that the default is harmless. If you are seeing a doctor to seek treatment for a condition and you do nothing you still have the condition and whatever it brings.
If you are deciding whether to get a vaccine for a deadly disease but 10% of the people who get it die you need to weigh that against probability you could get the disease and die. It's not 10% death vs nothing
I'm not saying to do nothing. I'm saying new isn't necessarily better. If there's a long standing treatment with good outcomes and low side effects, then maybe it's best to use the old treatment. Take traditional joint replacement verses the cobalt replacements as an example.
Readit News
Press coverage:
- https://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.amp
Presentation by authors:
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz6xUjJHTII
Or PDF: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4841483/pdf/rsp...
And on that note, most doctors (that you know personally anyways) will be skeptical of new treatments as they've seen the unintended consequences of previous miracle treatments. Things that have stood the test of time at least give you a better understanding of the potential outcomes.
Edit: why disagree?
If you are deciding whether to get a vaccine for a deadly disease but 10% of the people who get it die you need to weigh that against probability you could get the disease and die. It's not 10% death vs nothing
Doing nothing is still an action.