Ha ha ha! You damned fool, you've fallen right into our trap! Watch in awe as we eloquently explain the mechanism behind homeopathy, adduce dozens of large-scale pre-registered double-blinded studies, and conclude by rendering trivial the objection "but why isn't seawater and stuff like super potent homeopathic poison-cures?" with plausible and simple corollaries of the initially-explained physical mechanism.
Take it away, Majo! Now is when all the rigorous coursework in "Evidence, Application, & Terminology: the Study of Homeopathic Ingredients & Theory" pays off!
.
...Majo?
...
...look just hold tight man he's got the goods alright this is gonna blow your little establishment-drone MIND ;)
I studied homeopathy and have been using it since 1992 on myself and my family. I've attended the National Center's weekend seminar in '95 and learned much more about it, very impressed. My personal physician is a homeopath. I have in my repertoire aka., medicine cabinet, many remedies and a few helpful guidebooks written by reputable homeopaths, plus a repertory of remedies and Materia Medicas. (The remedies never expire if safely kept). I don't care what you choose to believe or think you know, nor do I wish to debate the subject. I do find your closed mindedness very sad indeed. You’re making blanket statements out of ignorance. I assume you are one of those who runs to get an RX filled at your friendly local pharmacy store as your first line of healing anything.
I sincerely recommend you reading up on how and when homeopathy was discovered. It’s a fascinating subject. The best source is NCH or National Center for Homeopathy.
I know how and when it was discovered. The theory behind it is bunk. Your assumptions about me and what I know and what I do are classic case of projection.
One minor thing - of course the "remedies" never expire, they are pure water.
Is the "monkey trap" thing even real? Where the monkeys self entrap because they can't let go of a snack, to the point where they can be caught by a predator?
I've heard this a bunch of times and I've seen a video (but like, how long did the monkey actually remain stuck, I don't recall) and never was particularly skeptical. But somehow hearing it from an economist ("burly coolies", "cobra effect") makes me suspicious. This guy (https://samknight.com/?p=924) says he could verify none of the monkey trap stories.
Also, pre-1960 this kind of thing was referred to as a [derogatory term] trap. It's a fable included in the Talmud and Aseop's collection, among other sources.
Thanks. I recommend it, and a lot of the point of the analysis is not that it's a serious trap, it's a thing that young people fall for, and they learn to do better.
Bateson presented it as a challenge-- what *general* advice would be useful for the monkey?
Probably not the same derogatory term, but not at all out of the question that many of these sources use different derogatory terms for different groups.
That sounds plausible, but I can't find a source to back that up. The only thing I found is Urban Dictionary's "a bucket of fried chicken placed under a net." (Unless I'm substituting in the wrong "derogatory term." Is it the delightfully rhyming "[East Asian] trap" instead? That gets me Pacific War propaganda posters.)
"I even contacted a zoo and was assured that, while a monkey may fuss with the prize for a minute or two, it is most certainly smart enough to let go."
Maybe this distracts the monkey long enough to sneak up on it and kill it though.
Ironically, the boiling pot metaphor is exactly backwards in real life. If you slowly increase the temperature of a pot, the frog will jump out when the temperature gets too high. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it will die too quickly to jump out.
The point about the Idea of the frog being boiled slowly is that humans aren't likely to notice gradually worsening conditions. The contrast was between conditions that get worse very gradually compared to conditions that get bad quickly, but not so fast as to be immediately deadly. Of course the frog jumps out of somewhat hot water, but maybe a slow increase would fool the frog.
> The point about the Idea of the frog being boiled slowly is that humans aren't likely to notice gradually worsening conditions.
I don't think it works in even the most direct sense. Imagine you, a human, are in a room. It's getting hotter and hotter. Will you ever try to leave the room? Would it matter how slow the increase in temperature was?
Why imagine that frogs are fundamentally defective in this way, compared to humans?
Cold-blooded animals have to be able to discern slow increases of temperature in order to survive. Otherwise the rising heat of noon would kill every cold-blooded animal not already in shelter.
Biologists correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that every vertebrate animal experiences physical sensation, and can tell when a temperature isn't optimal for it.
I'd go further: even if you put a frog in a pot of water and don't turn on the heat, the frog will jump out. Frogs are pretty skittish, they don't wanna be in this weird metal cylinder.
I read about it in Gregory Bateson. It was described as a method humans used for catching monkeys.
Now I'm left wondering about the trap for humans described in one of the early NLP books. Scientists tested rats (mice?) on their ability to run a maze for a reward, and then on how long it took the rodents to stop running the maze if the reward was taken away. The rodents quit trying after some reasonable amount of time.
They tested the result using grad students and a giant maze baited with $5 bills in a basement. The grad students are still breaking into the basement in case there's a $5 bill.
A good allegory about lost purposes. This was from the 80s, so people weren't as cynical about grad school then. The story reliably gets a laugh, speaking of incentives. But is there any truth at all?
I was going to say I tried testing this myself in college, and neither worked very well, but I suppose it depends on what kind of fly you're targeting. Vinegar works quite well on fruit flies, but appeared not to with whatever kind of flies the ones I tested it on then were.
(shudders) The only thing that worked was hanging fly paper *everywhere*. And of course I had to repeatedly explain to the property manager that no, they weren't fruit flies, so vinegar traps weren't going to work.
I recently catched a lot of fruit flies using traps with wine and vinegar under perforated plastic foil. A mix of wine and vinegar seemed to work best. Did not try honey, though.
I also tried this at one point out of curiosity, setting out bowls of water, honey-water, and vinegar-water. The vinegar worked best, although I admit I have no idea what it was catching.
I suspect this is a case where an essential element of a tool that evolved in different times in the hands of different people has vanished from the telling. Imagine a world in which foot traps in their historical form have been so long vanished that children only know about live traps. The metaphor about a wolf chewing its own foot off to escape no longer makes sense, so they change it to a story about a wolf who ignores his hunger and does not go into a live trap. Still later someone in a discussion about incentives where this metaphor comes up quibbles about whether or not animals ever get hungry enough to go into live traps.
The monkey trap probably works great if its original form was anything like the DIY coon traps in rural America a century ago: it's a can with sharpened nails driven through at an angle so that the little paw fits through empty but not full. The goal is to cause the animal pain upon initial attempt at extraction, causing it to panic and disable its paw to where it can't let go. When you find it hours later its mangled forelimb is hooked on at least one nail and killing it with a club is an act of mercy.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten that. Is there a drawing of the trap in the book? I remember seeing a schematic for it in an old book. Perhaps one of the Foxfire series, but I doubt it (Foxfire would have snares). I think the same book had an illustrated how-to on butchering snapping turtles.
This one is, from experience, very true : crabs will kill each other if you put a bunch of them in a bucket. They will also kill each other if a small crab enters into the hole of a bigger one by the way.
I'm going to unironically say that this is the *worst* line in the post.
Robin Hanson is using a motte and bailey here where the motte, of course, is "medical care isn't good at the margins" and the bailey is "medical care is useless".
Scott's being a quokka here. He doesn't seem to ever be able to recognize that someone's acting in bad faith, so when he's presented with a motte and bailey, all he can do is mutter about how he "apologizes" for pointing to the bailey and "misrepresenting" it as the motte instead of calling out for what it is.
Robin's actual proposal is to cut medical spending in half. He was explicit about that from his opening essay at Cato Unbound, it wasn't a position he retreated to after his interlocutors pushed back. If other people agreed with him on that then he would no longer qualify as a contrarian on that issue!
So, does he have any strong opinions on *which* half ought to be cut? If not, I think this still resolves as "Hanson thinks all medicine is equally bad."
He has also explicitly said that some treatments work, but he doesn't propose to select which treatments work himself. He's an economist and his proposal is instead to cut spending, and other people would make downstream decisions on which things to cut. There aren't people arguing "We should spend money on useless treatments", so merely saying we should get rid of them doesn't move us from the status quo (similar to people saying they will lower the budget by getting rid of "waste, fraud & abuse").
But, at least according to some of the quotes in this article, he disagrees with people who think we should expend any effort figuring out which half to cut. And the first bit of this article is pointing out that (at least as Scott sees it), Hanson has made individual statements that seem to disagree with _any_ particular way of figuring out which half to cut.
If medicine is taxed rather than subsidized, people will simply make choices about which things is cut and I don't think Robin would object then. If people insist on first figuring it out before cutting, then I think Robin won't expect it to get cut.
>But, at least according to some of the quotes in this article, he disagrees with people who think we should expend any effort figuring out which half to cut.
Doesn't
>eg Britain spends only half as much per person as the US on healthcare, and Brits have _approximately_ as good health outcomes
imply that British NHS decision makers _already_ know where to cut?
And, presumably we (writing from the usa) could either
- copy their policies
- have them remotely make these decisions for us (presumably at a price)
- kidnap some of them and install them in our health care system
and similarly for individual decisions such as
>So my second question for Robin is: how do you recommend I proceed? Do I avoid going to the doctor for some specific subset of these categories, like 5-10?
Admittedly, this isn't _exactly_ right. The UK and USA populations are a bit different, and e.g. the fraction of medical care that goes to treating e.g. gunshot wounds probably doesn't match across the pond... Still, the British experience seems to imply that _most_ of the right choices are already known.
People keep saying that. He was very explicit, e.g. end subsidy, read Cochrane reviews. He didn't personally review every extant medical intervention, is that what you mean?
In countries with public healthcare, the government decides what to spend it in. The free market has nothing to do with it. In countries with private healthcare, courts decide what you can sue your insurance company for not paying for. The free market has nothing to do with it. So where exactly is he planning on implementing this?
I think you're right about the motte and bailey but wrong in your judgment of Scott's reaction. Assuming good faith is often an effective play in this sort of situation. If it turns out they are actually arguing in good faith and just communicating badly, it avoids you being a dick for no reason. And more importantly, even if they are acting in bad faith, it allows you to avoid *looking* like a dick when you politely press them over the "confusion," which is exactly what Scott does here.
Assuming good faith makes you look epistemically virtuous, but sometimes at the expense of causing a slight deterioration in collective epistemics. People end up thinking a view is more plausible, or a thinker more honest, than they should, and would if they had instead been exposed to a critic more willing to call a spade a spade.
If you assume good faith and they're doing it in bad faith, they're going to say "I'm sorry you're confused but..." and keep running with the scam.
Hanson has already responded to Scott's response, and his re-response is basically "here's some more motte that I've posted in the past, see, I have actual quotes"--he's doubling down on the motte and completely failing to address the *inconsistency* between his past motte-posts and his past bailey-posts.
I'm a fan of how Scott handles this sort of thing! If he wrote Robin off as acting in bad faith then I would have very little interest in reading this post, since Scott would have no reason to address any of Robin's arguments outside of pointing out contradictions. I think if as a writer you don't think the person you're addressing has a real position that can be understood, it would be a waste of words to write about them in any detail.
When you politely assume a person is smart, and you may just be misunderstanding them, you're leaving the door open for them to clarify themselves. In the best case you might understand their position if you restate it and they correct you, but in the worst case they make a more specific contradiction or weaken their argument and either way you prove your point.
You might think there's a downside to being a quokka (never heard that one before lol) but from where I stand it's the best way to address an opponent, and also selfishly I would not be very interested in reading Scott just dunk on someone's contradictory position without really getting into the weeds of what they believe and making an effort to steelman them.
If someone is not sincere, "the weeds of what they believe" is a mirage. It may not be possible to get what they believe from what they're saying because their words and their beliefs *aren't connected*.
Oh totally, but it's very hard to be 100% sure someone is insincere, and doesn't cost you much to assume (or pretend to assume) that they are acting in good faith.
The alternative to responding to someone as if they were sincere shouldn't be calling them out for being insincere, it should be ignoring them. If you think you possess overwhelming evidence that someone won't engage in good faith, a big breakdown of their position like this followed by a "you must be a contrarian" call out won't change their mind anyway. And if Scott is making this post to try to convince the audience that this is a nonsensical position, he might as well give the benefit of the doubt, to look to the audience like a fair and even minded evaluator instead of someone trying to find extra reasons to dunk on a bad argument by claiming that anyone making it must be arguing for the sake of arguing.
Agreed. I hadn’t heard of Hanson before now, and for me to be able to confidently dismiss Hanson as a kook or a troll, I need to be able to tell that Hansen genuinely has nothing useful to say. A discussion that left open the possibility that Scott and Hansen were simply talking past each other would be too ambiguous for me to conclude much of anything without reading more of Hansen’s writings. Attempting to seriously engage a troll may be unrewarding work, but it provides a record that allows other people to determine with relatively little work on their part that the troll is indeed a troll or a kook.
Based on the exchange so far, I’ve provisionally placed Hansen in the troll/kook category, but I need to see Hanson’s response to this latest post by Scott before before I can pass judgement with confidence.
Prof. Robin Hanson is no troll. Though known for surprising ideas. Same GMU-faculty as are Caplan, Cowen, Tabarrok. And very active and well known in EA/rationalist circles. A friend. Who is now surprised Scott did not just call him to clear stuff up beforehand.
Too many people think that once you learn about a fallacy, the only thing you should do is diagnose the fallacy.
It's usually much better to use your knowledge of the fallacy to press the real question, and leave the diagnosis of the fallacy implicit. I know it *feels* like you're letting the terrorists win when you don't call them out. But calling out isn't the goal - understanding is.
Indeed. I've rarely seen anything as low key vicious as, eg, "So this was exactly what I said in my post, except that Robin takes out my explanation and quotes only half of the section, so that I look like a moron who didn’t read the paper."
Specifically, the sentence seems subservient, but it's much more devastating than a direct "Robin is lying here". Politeness and respect can hide devastatingly sharp blades.
I endorse this in principle, but in practice it feels kind of weird because the rest of the essay goes on to say "...but actually, Robin Hanson *did* say what I'm accusing him of, here are the quotes."
This way of dealing with the views of others is sometimes referred to as the golden rule of hermeneutics.
That is, if you present the views of someone you disagree with so that their views seem obviously stupid and/or evil, you are probably misrepresenting what they believe. Since very few want to come across in the eyes of others as stupid and/or evil.
Instead, present your opponent's views so that they may possibly make sense to you.
That said, sometimes some people are really stupid and/or evil. (As Kurt Vonnegut remarks in The Sirens of Titan: The trouble with stupid people is that they are too stupid to understand that not everybody are stupid.) But if so, let that "show itself" through further communication. Do not have that as an ...eh.. prior. Since that will block communication.
A lot of medicine is useless, and fear of death makes people overspend on medicine, but a lot of other economic activity is also useless and motivated by arguably irrational reasons. Is it inherently more problematic that people overspend on medicine than on luxury cars for instance? If people did follow up studies on other kinds of consumption there would be a lot of results showing that it’s useless or worse at improving people’s lives.
Yeah, I want to be really careful not to make anything that looks like a medical recommendation here. There's a lot of overtreatment in back pain, but I bet there are specific kinds of back pain where surgery is effective and important. I would recommend starting off from a position of mild skepticism, but doing some research and asking your doctors frank questions and maybe getting a second opinion, and letting those things push you to yes if they all seem plausible.
Going to a back surgeon with a herniated disk and seeing on the intake form, " Is this your first, second, third, fourth, fifth.....fifteenth.... back surgery," was very eye opening.
I apparently got pretty lucky in my back pain adventure. I have (had? I was told it might eventually heal and I haven't had a check in a long time) a partially herniated disk that was, for a while, causing quite significant (although not debilitating) back pain. I saw a specialist who recommended physical therapy and, even though he was a doctor who performed both steroid injections and surgeries, told me that the level of pain I had was not enough to warrant something that invasive.
He was absolutely correct, because now, several years later, I am _mostly_ pain free (I'm unsure how much the physical therapy helped vs. it just got better with time), but apparently the fact that I wasn't pushed quite strongly towards a surgery or at least a steroid injection is somewhat surprising.
I do think that the MRI that my non-specialist doctor ordered was probably a waste. He should have just sent me straight to physical therapy and saved me the couple of thousand dollars on imaging that didn't (from my perspective) seem to impact my care very much.
This is not a "gotcha" - but isn't this statement functionally equivalent, from an economist perspective, to what Hanson is saying? You both agree there's a continuum of cost vs benefits on back pain treatments, and you both agree that actual dollar costs go up the more you lean on surgery/medicine vs non-medical interventions, you both agree that the efficacy of those costlier medical interventions varies a bunch, and that it is often hard to tell.
Hanson says "therefore, spend less on medical treatments of back pain" and you say "therefore, approach the use of medical treatments of back pain with mild skepticism, get second opinions and only accept treatments that seem plausible."
But these things seem very similar, in both the near and far way? "Medical interventions may be more costly/less effective than you think!" and "you should approach claims of medical intervention efficacy with mild skepticism, and demand a higher level of plausibility" result in the same actual actions by patients when confronted by back pain.
In both cases, in an economics context, you are both saying "when doing a pro/con on whether to get a medical treatment, you should put less weight on the pro side." Hanson isn't medical, so he can't provide *medical* recommendations on whether a given treatment passes the cost benefit test, (whereas you can) but he can look at aggregated data on outcomes, and make *economic* recommendations (i.e. based on the patient's desires).
At a high level, I think RH is thinking on the margin of the economic incentives: that if we convinced Americans to cut their aggregate medical spending by 100m, say by reducing medicare reimbursement rates across the board by a %, this would change every single one of their cost/benefit analyses for treatments. This would have a marginal impact on decisions, but would only actually change patient's decisions to seek medical treatment in a tiny % of cases: those where the patient's perceived net benefit from the treatment, minus costs, was greater than the small % change: and this (by definition) would be the (allowing for notoriously bad patient assessment) least beneficial cases: i.e. the guy saying "yeah my back hurts, but I've decided to lift weights and do PT from youtube instead of the now-more-costly-surgery". RH is saying that cost cut would, on the margin, likely make every patient better off (and also the payers, who have cut costs).
Obviously, yes, there would be some patients who go "100 bucks more to pay to treat my gunshot wound? No thanks!" and then die but RH is betting that those cases are rare enough that the benefit from the other vast majority of cases where patients do properly weight their cost-benefit will outweigh that.
Many more people have enough scientific literacy to investigate medical questions for themselves than actually do. If you are able to read literature and understand it well enough to have a meaningful back and forth with your doctor (to ask a question like "a systematic review found only low-quality evidence that people with my condition benefit from this surgery more than they would from physical therapy, why do you think it's recommended in my case") I feel like you should do that--especially for something as intensive and risky as surgery--rather than take a hearsay observation, even from someone you respect who is also a doctor, and run with it. This has got to be one of the most fruitful uses for a scientific education. I don't mean to impugn you specifically, especially not knowing your background, but I see people reasoning about their own medical care by lurching from one hasty generalization to the next all the time (I have surely done it too) and I'm really curious about what reasoning actually governs these decisions and why, besides laziness and time constraints, we rely on it anyway.
I think we ought not to treat back pain as a specific disease, because we'd get in the same trap as treating headaches as a disease. That's a symptom and not a cause. The cause is what's relevant. Try to under-treat a herniated disk(take a severe case), then we'll see. Don't make general statements about surgery. It might save your life some day.
Luxury cars are not generally paid for with other people's money. The enormous amount of medical spending that is paid for in really indirect ways makes it much more susceptible to perverse incentives.
I believe it's part of Robin's point, but we don't subsidize luxury cars and definitely don't guarantee that everyone can get a luxury car. Some people argue that medical care is a human right, and almost everyone even in the US agrees that certain care should happen regardless of ability to pay. I think if we allowed people to get whatever medical care they can afford (as they can with luxury cars), that he would be just as okay with that as someone cutting half of all medical expenditures.
That is a good point but in the Fear of Death and Muddled Thinking article he seems to concentrate most on how this is all a problem of human rationality, not one of subsidies.
The countries where health is subsidized more by the government are more keen on cutting down on costs. So there’s a certain paradox there.
The US might have one of the worst overall systems when it comes to cost incentives. I think the cost incentives in countries with universal systems is bad, but not nearly as bad as in the US. In universal systems there's at least pressure on the payer (government) to limit the care given.
Big picture, the US separates the people paying for procedures from those deciding when/how/who for those procedures. Employers pay for employees to get coverage, but can't decide how it's spent. The government mandates certain levels of coverage, but puts in few to no meaningful limits on that spending. Insurance companies pay for the care, but pass along costs to others. Hospitals convince patients they need care (right or wrong) while the patients only pay a small portion of the overall costs.
It's like if you were buying a car for your own use but someone else was paying for it. You might decide to be frugal and careful to get a car, but there's no compelling reason to do so. Some people would get exactly what they needed, but most people would instead fit into one of two buckets - 1) they would buy a car they otherwise would not have gotten, whether because they couldn't afford it or because they didn't need it, or 2) they would get more car than was needed for their purposes, at least getting a few upgrades to features but maybe even a higher level of car entirely.
Well, yes. But there's a difference -- I think -- to taking what's essentially a placebo, or most likely to be, or at best "just in case, won't harm" or a vehicle for improving one's feeling of control and agency (I take vitamins + couple other supplements purely on this basis) and getting treatment that we believe will DIRECTLY improve physical state of the body in the desired direction. One reason for that being that many (maybe most) effective treatments have significant costs in effort, pain, time, potential side effects and if you live in the place like the US, also money.
So I can pop a 4x DRA of D3 daily because the cost is minimal and it gives me a good feeling and who knows, maybe leaving at a cloudy 57N I need it. But I'll not take a SSRI for moderate trauma induced anxiety because the cost (potential side effects and the dangers of long term use in this case) are not worth the possible benefits. IF I knew that that very same Sertraline was guaranteed to glue my broken brain back to where it was 6 years ago, I'd take it for sure.
I'll have massage because it feels good to be touched by another adult human, and it's relaxing but I'll cancel the appointment if I don't have money for it. Had I believed it was HEALING my hip arthritis I'd prioritise this spend. Etc etc.
Rarely, if ever, have I seen someone go to such lengths to prove something so obvious.
Huge respect for Robin Hanson, but this is an issue where he seems to have fallen into the contrarian trap of defending a stupid premise purely to show off how cleverly he can defend it. "Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
I think Hanson is a worthwhile thinker in the Rule Thinkers In, Not Out sense, but this kind of incautious contrarianism (and lack of clarity about his own central points) isn't at all atypical of him.
Yes. It's the unfortunately-familiar libertarian game of intellectual whack-a-mole. I'm frankly not seeing here any reasons to have huge respect for Hanson (which is ironic since I'm personally a cautious/skeptical health care consumer to the point of regularly exasperating my spouse on the topic).
This newest post clarifies that Scott's frustrated and almost frantic re-engagement with Hanson's childish intellectual bullying on this topic is being fueled by the situation with Scott's son. Every veteran parent grasps how that is feeling for Scott and his wife right now. Hanson obviously does not and never will.
The misshapen head link Scott supplied mentioned that it is more common with twins. Not speaking to his situation at all, but in general the significant rise in multiple births and hence the problems associated with them, could potentially be considered one of those ways in which medicine both gives and takes.
My understanding is that the primary cause of increased flat-headedness is a success of the movement to put kids to sleep on their back rather than their stomach in order to avoid SIDS.
I really don't think that labelling this kind of thing with _any_ particular political ideology is either A) true (in the sense that only one particular ideology uses this kind of strategy) or B) useful/helpful/elevating to the conversation.
I was going to say the same thing. To add, at an extreme of this phenomenon you get flat earthers: use a complex edifice of clever arguments to arrive at an obviously wrong conclusion, then make that conclusion a key part of your identity, and defend this identity at all costs.
I think that's a slightly different phenomenon; there are no flat-earth arguments that are "clever", at best they are confusing.
Modern medicine is sufficiently complicated that a logical case can, with effort, be constructed against it (albeit one that is pretty easy to demolish by someone of equal intelligence to the edifice's designer). The earth's roundness, on the other hand, has been settled science for thousands of years.
> Maybe we should skip it - I never see any adults with obviously mis-shapen heads out there
For anecdotal evidence, I had a friend in middle school with this issue. It's less noticable as an adult (possibly he learned to hide it better with haircuts or something? Or maybe it just got milder naturally), so you might not notice it passing him on the street but you probably would if you were sitting down for a conversation with him. I don't think the helmets were available back then.
I also know some people like this. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I might have done double-takes and stared a little on first encounters.
Homeopathy is pure placebo. I guess the placebo effect is real, so in this sense homeopathy is real.
It most certainly is not placebo.
It has no plausible mechanism for working. Diluting an active ingredient until its presence is undetectable leaves behind expensive water.
Your comment goes to show you know nothing about it, have not studied homeopathy and so your comment is totally ignorantly based.
Sure. Water without an active ingredient nonetheless.
Ha ha ha! You damned fool, you've fallen right into our trap! Watch in awe as we eloquently explain the mechanism behind homeopathy, adduce dozens of large-scale pre-registered double-blinded studies, and conclude by rendering trivial the objection "but why isn't seawater and stuff like super potent homeopathic poison-cures?" with plausible and simple corollaries of the initially-explained physical mechanism.
Take it away, Majo! Now is when all the rigorous coursework in "Evidence, Application, & Terminology: the Study of Homeopathic Ingredients & Theory" pays off!
.
...Majo?
...
...look just hold tight man he's got the goods alright this is gonna blow your little establishment-drone MIND ;)
Yes yes yes I can't wait, hopping with excitement here! :)
Like I said, you are not qualified to comment as you’re totally ignorant on the subject.
I'll comment anyway. Empty water. Good placebo.
Closed mind.
Yes, I guard my mind against junk. I duly note, however, the total lack of any counter-evidence. Anything?
Until then, empty water proffered by scam artists.
I studied homeopathy and have been using it since 1992 on myself and my family. I've attended the National Center's weekend seminar in '95 and learned much more about it, very impressed. My personal physician is a homeopath. I have in my repertoire aka., medicine cabinet, many remedies and a few helpful guidebooks written by reputable homeopaths, plus a repertory of remedies and Materia Medicas. (The remedies never expire if safely kept). I don't care what you choose to believe or think you know, nor do I wish to debate the subject. I do find your closed mindedness very sad indeed. You’re making blanket statements out of ignorance. I assume you are one of those who runs to get an RX filled at your friendly local pharmacy store as your first line of healing anything.
I sincerely recommend you reading up on how and when homeopathy was discovered. It’s a fascinating subject. The best source is NCH or National Center for Homeopathy.
I know how and when it was discovered. The theory behind it is bunk. Your assumptions about me and what I know and what I do are classic case of projection.
One minor thing - of course the "remedies" never expire, they are pure water.
This conversation back and forth is useless. I’m done and you should be too.
Is the "monkey trap" thing even real? Where the monkeys self entrap because they can't let go of a snack, to the point where they can be caught by a predator?
I've heard this a bunch of times and I've seen a video (but like, how long did the monkey actually remain stuck, I don't recall) and never was particularly skeptical. But somehow hearing it from an economist ("burly coolies", "cobra effect") makes me suspicious. This guy (https://samknight.com/?p=924) says he could verify none of the monkey trap stories.
Also, pre-1960 this kind of thing was referred to as a [derogatory term] trap. It's a fable included in the Talmud and Aseop's collection, among other sources.
There's this video, I think from some Disney documentary, but I don't think they were above fakery.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0VI_BXlFI0
got a link to the fable in Aesop or Talmud? apparently, you can call it an apologue if it's exaggerated/fake
Is it this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_and_the_Filberts
Thanks. I recommend it, and a lot of the point of the analysis is not that it's a serious trap, it's a thing that young people fall for, and they learn to do better.
Bateson presented it as a challenge-- what *general* advice would be useful for the monkey?
I'm guessing that whatever [derogatory term] was, it wasn't used in the Talmud or by Aesop.
Probably not the same derogatory term, but not at all out of the question that many of these sources use different derogatory terms for different groups.
That sounds plausible, but I can't find a source to back that up. The only thing I found is Urban Dictionary's "a bucket of fried chicken placed under a net." (Unless I'm substituting in the wrong "derogatory term." Is it the delightfully rhyming "[East Asian] trap" instead? That gets me Pacific War propaganda posters.)
"I even contacted a zoo and was assured that, while a monkey may fuss with the prize for a minute or two, it is most certainly smart enough to let go."
Maybe this distracts the monkey long enough to sneak up on it and kill it though.
Yeah, and frogs get out of water if the temperature goes too high, even if it's increased slowly.
This is why pot lids were invented.
Ironically, the boiling pot metaphor is exactly backwards in real life. If you slowly increase the temperature of a pot, the frog will jump out when the temperature gets too high. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it will die too quickly to jump out.
Like Desertopa has said, there's no "even" here. The slow increase is the only way to get the frog to jump out.
The point about the Idea of the frog being boiled slowly is that humans aren't likely to notice gradually worsening conditions. The contrast was between conditions that get worse very gradually compared to conditions that get bad quickly, but not so fast as to be immediately deadly. Of course the frog jumps out of somewhat hot water, but maybe a slow increase would fool the frog.
> The point about the Idea of the frog being boiled slowly is that humans aren't likely to notice gradually worsening conditions.
I don't think it works in even the most direct sense. Imagine you, a human, are in a room. It's getting hotter and hotter. Will you ever try to leave the room? Would it matter how slow the increase in temperature was?
Why imagine that frogs are fundamentally defective in this way, compared to humans?
This isn't about temperature. If you country is gradually getting worse for you, when do you decide to leave?
Cold-blooded animals have to be able to discern slow increases of temperature in order to survive. Otherwise the rising heat of noon would kill every cold-blooded animal not already in shelter.
Biologists correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that every vertebrate animal experiences physical sensation, and can tell when a temperature isn't optimal for it.
I'd go further: even if you put a frog in a pot of water and don't turn on the heat, the frog will jump out. Frogs are pretty skittish, they don't wanna be in this weird metal cylinder.
Further, you catch the most flies with a mix of honey and vinegar.
I read about it in Gregory Bateson. It was described as a method humans used for catching monkeys.
Now I'm left wondering about the trap for humans described in one of the early NLP books. Scientists tested rats (mice?) on their ability to run a maze for a reward, and then on how long it took the rodents to stop running the maze if the reward was taken away. The rodents quit trying after some reasonable amount of time.
They tested the result using grad students and a giant maze baited with $5 bills in a basement. The grad students are still breaking into the basement in case there's a $5 bill.
A good allegory about lost purposes. This was from the 80s, so people weren't as cynical about grad school then. The story reliably gets a laugh, speaking of incentives. But is there any truth at all?
Rats don't have access to religious purpose, born from tradition of a forgotten origin.
The comments on whether monkey traps actually work reminds me of a proverb I've heard, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."
This was intended as a metaphor, of course, but I found it amusing, because vinegar is in fact an excellent fly trap.
I think I've heard that one less often than "you catch more flies with honey but you catch more honeys being fly"
I was going to say I tried testing this myself in college, and neither worked very well, but I suppose it depends on what kind of fly you're targeting. Vinegar works quite well on fruit flies, but appeared not to with whatever kind of flies the ones I tested it on then were.
Phorid flies don't seem to care about vinegar, but look a lot like fruit flies.
(shudders) The only thing that worked was hanging fly paper *everywhere*. And of course I had to repeatedly explain to the property manager that no, they weren't fruit flies, so vinegar traps weren't going to work.
I recently catched a lot of fruit flies using traps with wine and vinegar under perforated plastic foil. A mix of wine and vinegar seemed to work best. Did not try honey, though.
I also tried this at one point out of curiosity, setting out bowls of water, honey-water, and vinegar-water. The vinegar worked best, although I admit I have no idea what it was catching.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/357/
I suspect this is a case where an essential element of a tool that evolved in different times in the hands of different people has vanished from the telling. Imagine a world in which foot traps in their historical form have been so long vanished that children only know about live traps. The metaphor about a wolf chewing its own foot off to escape no longer makes sense, so they change it to a story about a wolf who ignores his hunger and does not go into a live trap. Still later someone in a discussion about incentives where this metaphor comes up quibbles about whether or not animals ever get hungry enough to go into live traps.
The monkey trap probably works great if its original form was anything like the DIY coon traps in rural America a century ago: it's a can with sharpened nails driven through at an angle so that the little paw fits through empty but not full. The goal is to cause the animal pain upon initial attempt at extraction, causing it to panic and disable its paw to where it can't let go. When you find it hours later its mangled forelimb is hooked on at least one nail and killing it with a club is an act of mercy.
The "Where The Red Fern Grows" raccoon trap, that is - the protagonist trapped one raccoon (dishonorably) to fund the purchase of his hounds.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten that. Is there a drawing of the trap in the book? I remember seeing a schematic for it in an old book. Perhaps one of the Foxfire series, but I doubt it (Foxfire would have snares). I think the same book had an illustrated how-to on butchering snapping turtles.
It's not. Just like the boiling frog experiment is fake and the "5 monkeys and a banana on a ladder" experiment are also fake.
Crabs in buckets too, probably.
This one is, from experience, very true : crabs will kill each other if you put a bunch of them in a bucket. They will also kill each other if a small crab enters into the hole of a bigger one by the way.
The monkey trap sounds about as likely as Buridan's Ass starving to death.
"...I guess I must be misrepresenting him, and I apologize."
Without reading to the end, I predict that this is the most important line in this post. Polite and human disagreement is possible and valuable!
I'm going to unironically say that this is the *worst* line in the post.
Robin Hanson is using a motte and bailey here where the motte, of course, is "medical care isn't good at the margins" and the bailey is "medical care is useless".
Scott's being a quokka here. He doesn't seem to ever be able to recognize that someone's acting in bad faith, so when he's presented with a motte and bailey, all he can do is mutter about how he "apologizes" for pointing to the bailey and "misrepresenting" it as the motte instead of calling out for what it is.
Robin's actual proposal is to cut medical spending in half. He was explicit about that from his opening essay at Cato Unbound, it wasn't a position he retreated to after his interlocutors pushed back. If other people agreed with him on that then he would no longer qualify as a contrarian on that issue!
So, does he have any strong opinions on *which* half ought to be cut? If not, I think this still resolves as "Hanson thinks all medicine is equally bad."
He has also explicitly said that some treatments work, but he doesn't propose to select which treatments work himself. He's an economist and his proposal is instead to cut spending, and other people would make downstream decisions on which things to cut. There aren't people arguing "We should spend money on useless treatments", so merely saying we should get rid of them doesn't move us from the status quo (similar to people saying they will lower the budget by getting rid of "waste, fraud & abuse").
But, at least according to some of the quotes in this article, he disagrees with people who think we should expend any effort figuring out which half to cut. And the first bit of this article is pointing out that (at least as Scott sees it), Hanson has made individual statements that seem to disagree with _any_ particular way of figuring out which half to cut.
If medicine is taxed rather than subsidized, people will simply make choices about which things is cut and I don't think Robin would object then. If people insist on first figuring it out before cutting, then I think Robin won't expect it to get cut.
>But, at least according to some of the quotes in this article, he disagrees with people who think we should expend any effort figuring out which half to cut.
Doesn't
>eg Britain spends only half as much per person as the US on healthcare, and Brits have _approximately_ as good health outcomes
imply that British NHS decision makers _already_ know where to cut?
And, presumably we (writing from the usa) could either
- copy their policies
- have them remotely make these decisions for us (presumably at a price)
- kidnap some of them and install them in our health care system
and similarly for individual decisions such as
>So my second question for Robin is: how do you recommend I proceed? Do I avoid going to the doctor for some specific subset of these categories, like 5-10?
Admittedly, this isn't _exactly_ right. The UK and USA populations are a bit different, and e.g. the fraction of medical care that goes to treating e.g. gunshot wounds probably doesn't match across the pond... Still, the British experience seems to imply that _most_ of the right choices are already known.
People keep saying that. He was very explicit, e.g. end subsidy, read Cochrane reviews. He didn't personally review every extant medical intervention, is that what you mean?
Did you intend to reply to someone else? I agree he wants to end subsidies.
In countries with public healthcare, the government decides what to spend it in. The free market has nothing to do with it. In countries with private healthcare, courts decide what you can sue your insurance company for not paying for. The free market has nothing to do with it. So where exactly is he planning on implementing this?
I think you're right about the motte and bailey but wrong in your judgment of Scott's reaction. Assuming good faith is often an effective play in this sort of situation. If it turns out they are actually arguing in good faith and just communicating badly, it avoids you being a dick for no reason. And more importantly, even if they are acting in bad faith, it allows you to avoid *looking* like a dick when you politely press them over the "confusion," which is exactly what Scott does here.
Assuming good faith makes you look epistemically virtuous, but sometimes at the expense of causing a slight deterioration in collective epistemics. People end up thinking a view is more plausible, or a thinker more honest, than they should, and would if they had instead been exposed to a critic more willing to call a spade a spade.
If you assume good faith and they're doing it in bad faith, they're going to say "I'm sorry you're confused but..." and keep running with the scam.
Hanson has already responded to Scott's response, and his re-response is basically "here's some more motte that I've posted in the past, see, I have actual quotes"--he's doubling down on the motte and completely failing to address the *inconsistency* between his past motte-posts and his past bailey-posts.
It is possible to read the whole "oh poor me I must be mistaken I so sorry" line as vitriolic sarcasm. I suggest trying it.
Scott's past writings don't support that interpretation. He couldn't even admit that *Cade Metz* was malicious all along.
I'm a fan of how Scott handles this sort of thing! If he wrote Robin off as acting in bad faith then I would have very little interest in reading this post, since Scott would have no reason to address any of Robin's arguments outside of pointing out contradictions. I think if as a writer you don't think the person you're addressing has a real position that can be understood, it would be a waste of words to write about them in any detail.
When you politely assume a person is smart, and you may just be misunderstanding them, you're leaving the door open for them to clarify themselves. In the best case you might understand their position if you restate it and they correct you, but in the worst case they make a more specific contradiction or weaken their argument and either way you prove your point.
You might think there's a downside to being a quokka (never heard that one before lol) but from where I stand it's the best way to address an opponent, and also selfishly I would not be very interested in reading Scott just dunk on someone's contradictory position without really getting into the weeds of what they believe and making an effort to steelman them.
If someone is not sincere, "the weeds of what they believe" is a mirage. It may not be possible to get what they believe from what they're saying because their words and their beliefs *aren't connected*.
Oh totally, but it's very hard to be 100% sure someone is insincere, and doesn't cost you much to assume (or pretend to assume) that they are acting in good faith.
The alternative to responding to someone as if they were sincere shouldn't be calling them out for being insincere, it should be ignoring them. If you think you possess overwhelming evidence that someone won't engage in good faith, a big breakdown of their position like this followed by a "you must be a contrarian" call out won't change their mind anyway. And if Scott is making this post to try to convince the audience that this is a nonsensical position, he might as well give the benefit of the doubt, to look to the audience like a fair and even minded evaluator instead of someone trying to find extra reasons to dunk on a bad argument by claiming that anyone making it must be arguing for the sake of arguing.
Agreed. I hadn’t heard of Hanson before now, and for me to be able to confidently dismiss Hanson as a kook or a troll, I need to be able to tell that Hansen genuinely has nothing useful to say. A discussion that left open the possibility that Scott and Hansen were simply talking past each other would be too ambiguous for me to conclude much of anything without reading more of Hansen’s writings. Attempting to seriously engage a troll may be unrewarding work, but it provides a record that allows other people to determine with relatively little work on their part that the troll is indeed a troll or a kook.
Based on the exchange so far, I’ve provisionally placed Hansen in the troll/kook category, but I need to see Hanson’s response to this latest post by Scott before before I can pass judgement with confidence.
Here's Hanson's response. It's not good.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine
Prof. Robin Hanson is no troll. Though known for surprising ideas. Same GMU-faculty as are Caplan, Cowen, Tabarrok. And very active and well known in EA/rationalist circles. A friend. Who is now surprised Scott did not just call him to clear stuff up beforehand.
Quokkas rule, therefore Scott does, too. Your meme metaphor has unwittingly played straight into my hands!
... Don't quokkas throw their children at predators in order to save themselves?
I have teenagers. If this is true, it just makes me love them more.
being a good faith arguer regardless of who you're arguing with is in fact virtuous and valuable.
Too many people think that once you learn about a fallacy, the only thing you should do is diagnose the fallacy.
It's usually much better to use your knowledge of the fallacy to press the real question, and leave the diagnosis of the fallacy implicit. I know it *feels* like you're letting the terrorists win when you don't call them out. But calling out isn't the goal - understanding is.
I read that line as basically "Robin Hanson says I'm misrepresenting his opinion, and Robin Hanson is an honorable man."
Indeed. I've rarely seen anything as low key vicious as, eg, "So this was exactly what I said in my post, except that Robin takes out my explanation and quotes only half of the section, so that I look like a moron who didn’t read the paper."
Specifically, the sentence seems subservient, but it's much more devastating than a direct "Robin is lying here". Politeness and respect can hide devastatingly sharp blades.
Yeah, that was the vibe I got.
I endorse this in principle, but in practice it feels kind of weird because the rest of the essay goes on to say "...but actually, Robin Hanson *did* say what I'm accusing him of, here are the quotes."
I don't read it as an accusation so much as an invitation to communal debugging:
- Robin Hanson claims he doesn't say what I thought he did.
- This is a highly detailed paper trail of why I came to believe that he said that.
- Help me find the contradiction.
This way of dealing with the views of others is sometimes referred to as the golden rule of hermeneutics.
That is, if you present the views of someone you disagree with so that their views seem obviously stupid and/or evil, you are probably misrepresenting what they believe. Since very few want to come across in the eyes of others as stupid and/or evil.
Instead, present your opponent's views so that they may possibly make sense to you.
That said, sometimes some people are really stupid and/or evil. (As Kurt Vonnegut remarks in The Sirens of Titan: The trouble with stupid people is that they are too stupid to understand that not everybody are stupid.) But if so, let that "show itself" through further communication. Do not have that as an ...eh.. prior. Since that will block communication.
A lot of medicine is useless, and fear of death makes people overspend on medicine, but a lot of other economic activity is also useless and motivated by arguably irrational reasons. Is it inherently more problematic that people overspend on medicine than on luxury cars for instance? If people did follow up studies on other kinds of consumption there would be a lot of results showing that it’s useless or worse at improving people’s lives.
This is still useful to know for my private life. If a doctor suggests surgery for back pain, I'll know that it's useless and won't do it.
You won’t know that about any specific case of back surgery.
Yeah, I want to be really careful not to make anything that looks like a medical recommendation here. There's a lot of overtreatment in back pain, but I bet there are specific kinds of back pain where surgery is effective and important. I would recommend starting off from a position of mild skepticism, but doing some research and asking your doctors frank questions and maybe getting a second opinion, and letting those things push you to yes if they all seem plausible.
Or just find a specialist who thinks that there's a lot of over-treatment in back pain, and go from there.
Going to a back surgeon with a herniated disk and seeing on the intake form, " Is this your first, second, third, fourth, fifth.....fifteenth.... back surgery," was very eye opening.
I apparently got pretty lucky in my back pain adventure. I have (had? I was told it might eventually heal and I haven't had a check in a long time) a partially herniated disk that was, for a while, causing quite significant (although not debilitating) back pain. I saw a specialist who recommended physical therapy and, even though he was a doctor who performed both steroid injections and surgeries, told me that the level of pain I had was not enough to warrant something that invasive.
He was absolutely correct, because now, several years later, I am _mostly_ pain free (I'm unsure how much the physical therapy helped vs. it just got better with time), but apparently the fact that I wasn't pushed quite strongly towards a surgery or at least a steroid injection is somewhat surprising.
I do think that the MRI that my non-specialist doctor ordered was probably a waste. He should have just sent me straight to physical therapy and saved me the couple of thousand dollars on imaging that didn't (from my perspective) seem to impact my care very much.
Good point. I know of one person in particular whose back surgery got him out of a wheel chair and walking and swimming normally.
This is not a "gotcha" - but isn't this statement functionally equivalent, from an economist perspective, to what Hanson is saying? You both agree there's a continuum of cost vs benefits on back pain treatments, and you both agree that actual dollar costs go up the more you lean on surgery/medicine vs non-medical interventions, you both agree that the efficacy of those costlier medical interventions varies a bunch, and that it is often hard to tell.
Hanson says "therefore, spend less on medical treatments of back pain" and you say "therefore, approach the use of medical treatments of back pain with mild skepticism, get second opinions and only accept treatments that seem plausible."
But these things seem very similar, in both the near and far way? "Medical interventions may be more costly/less effective than you think!" and "you should approach claims of medical intervention efficacy with mild skepticism, and demand a higher level of plausibility" result in the same actual actions by patients when confronted by back pain.
In both cases, in an economics context, you are both saying "when doing a pro/con on whether to get a medical treatment, you should put less weight on the pro side." Hanson isn't medical, so he can't provide *medical* recommendations on whether a given treatment passes the cost benefit test, (whereas you can) but he can look at aggregated data on outcomes, and make *economic* recommendations (i.e. based on the patient's desires).
At a high level, I think RH is thinking on the margin of the economic incentives: that if we convinced Americans to cut their aggregate medical spending by 100m, say by reducing medicare reimbursement rates across the board by a %, this would change every single one of their cost/benefit analyses for treatments. This would have a marginal impact on decisions, but would only actually change patient's decisions to seek medical treatment in a tiny % of cases: those where the patient's perceived net benefit from the treatment, minus costs, was greater than the small % change: and this (by definition) would be the (allowing for notoriously bad patient assessment) least beneficial cases: i.e. the guy saying "yeah my back hurts, but I've decided to lift weights and do PT from youtube instead of the now-more-costly-surgery". RH is saying that cost cut would, on the margin, likely make every patient better off (and also the payers, who have cut costs).
Obviously, yes, there would be some patients who go "100 bucks more to pay to treat my gunshot wound? No thanks!" and then die but RH is betting that those cases are rare enough that the benefit from the other vast majority of cases where patients do properly weight their cost-benefit will outweigh that.
Many more people have enough scientific literacy to investigate medical questions for themselves than actually do. If you are able to read literature and understand it well enough to have a meaningful back and forth with your doctor (to ask a question like "a systematic review found only low-quality evidence that people with my condition benefit from this surgery more than they would from physical therapy, why do you think it's recommended in my case") I feel like you should do that--especially for something as intensive and risky as surgery--rather than take a hearsay observation, even from someone you respect who is also a doctor, and run with it. This has got to be one of the most fruitful uses for a scientific education. I don't mean to impugn you specifically, especially not knowing your background, but I see people reasoning about their own medical care by lurching from one hasty generalization to the next all the time (I have surely done it too) and I'm really curious about what reasoning actually governs these decisions and why, besides laziness and time constraints, we rely on it anyway.
A close relative of mine got back pain surgery that helped, so careful with following this kind of blanket statements.
I think we ought not to treat back pain as a specific disease, because we'd get in the same trap as treating headaches as a disease. That's a symptom and not a cause. The cause is what's relevant. Try to under-treat a herniated disk(take a severe case), then we'll see. Don't make general statements about surgery. It might save your life some day.
Luxury cars are not generally paid for with other people's money. The enormous amount of medical spending that is paid for in really indirect ways makes it much more susceptible to perverse incentives.
I believe it's part of Robin's point, but we don't subsidize luxury cars and definitely don't guarantee that everyone can get a luxury car. Some people argue that medical care is a human right, and almost everyone even in the US agrees that certain care should happen regardless of ability to pay. I think if we allowed people to get whatever medical care they can afford (as they can with luxury cars), that he would be just as okay with that as someone cutting half of all medical expenditures.
That is a good point but in the Fear of Death and Muddled Thinking article he seems to concentrate most on how this is all a problem of human rationality, not one of subsidies.
The countries where health is subsidized more by the government are more keen on cutting down on costs. So there’s a certain paradox there.
The US might have one of the worst overall systems when it comes to cost incentives. I think the cost incentives in countries with universal systems is bad, but not nearly as bad as in the US. In universal systems there's at least pressure on the payer (government) to limit the care given.
Big picture, the US separates the people paying for procedures from those deciding when/how/who for those procedures. Employers pay for employees to get coverage, but can't decide how it's spent. The government mandates certain levels of coverage, but puts in few to no meaningful limits on that spending. Insurance companies pay for the care, but pass along costs to others. Hospitals convince patients they need care (right or wrong) while the patients only pay a small portion of the overall costs.
It's like if you were buying a car for your own use but someone else was paying for it. You might decide to be frugal and careful to get a car, but there's no compelling reason to do so. Some people would get exactly what they needed, but most people would instead fit into one of two buckets - 1) they would buy a car they otherwise would not have gotten, whether because they couldn't afford it or because they didn't need it, or 2) they would get more car than was needed for their purposes, at least getting a few upgrades to features but maybe even a higher level of car entirely.
Well, yes. But there's a difference -- I think -- to taking what's essentially a placebo, or most likely to be, or at best "just in case, won't harm" or a vehicle for improving one's feeling of control and agency (I take vitamins + couple other supplements purely on this basis) and getting treatment that we believe will DIRECTLY improve physical state of the body in the desired direction. One reason for that being that many (maybe most) effective treatments have significant costs in effort, pain, time, potential side effects and if you live in the place like the US, also money.
So I can pop a 4x DRA of D3 daily because the cost is minimal and it gives me a good feeling and who knows, maybe leaving at a cloudy 57N I need it. But I'll not take a SSRI for moderate trauma induced anxiety because the cost (potential side effects and the dangers of long term use in this case) are not worth the possible benefits. IF I knew that that very same Sertraline was guaranteed to glue my broken brain back to where it was 6 years ago, I'd take it for sure.
I'll have massage because it feels good to be touched by another adult human, and it's relaxing but I'll cancel the appointment if I don't have money for it. Had I believed it was HEALING my hip arthritis I'd prioritise this spend. Etc etc.
Rarely, if ever, have I seen someone go to such lengths to prove something so obvious.
Huge respect for Robin Hanson, but this is an issue where he seems to have fallen into the contrarian trap of defending a stupid premise purely to show off how cleverly he can defend it. "Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
That's the impression I'm getting as well, particularly from the apparent internal inconsistencies and refusal to engage with Scott's main points.
I think Hanson is a worthwhile thinker in the Rule Thinkers In, Not Out sense, but this kind of incautious contrarianism (and lack of clarity about his own central points) isn't at all atypical of him.
Yes. It's the unfortunately-familiar libertarian game of intellectual whack-a-mole. I'm frankly not seeing here any reasons to have huge respect for Hanson (which is ironic since I'm personally a cautious/skeptical health care consumer to the point of regularly exasperating my spouse on the topic).
This newest post clarifies that Scott's frustrated and almost frantic re-engagement with Hanson's childish intellectual bullying on this topic is being fueled by the situation with Scott's son. Every veteran parent grasps how that is feeling for Scott and his wife right now. Hanson obviously does not and never will.
The misshapen head link Scott supplied mentioned that it is more common with twins. Not speaking to his situation at all, but in general the significant rise in multiple births and hence the problems associated with them, could potentially be considered one of those ways in which medicine both gives and takes.
My understanding is that the primary cause of increased flat-headedness is a success of the movement to put kids to sleep on their back rather than their stomach in order to avoid SIDS.
"Childish intellectual bullying" is what you recall Hanson responding to Scott's critique?
> Every veteran parent grasps how that is feeling for Scott and his wife right now. Hanson obviously does not and never will.
He has multiple offspring.
I really don't think that labelling this kind of thing with _any_ particular political ideology is either A) true (in the sense that only one particular ideology uses this kind of strategy) or B) useful/helpful/elevating to the conversation.
His proposal to municipalize medicine was an attempt to "pull the rope sideways" rather than arguing in favor of private over public medicine:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/06/municipalize-medicine.html
I was going to say the same thing. To add, at an extreme of this phenomenon you get flat earthers: use a complex edifice of clever arguments to arrive at an obviously wrong conclusion, then make that conclusion a key part of your identity, and defend this identity at all costs.
I think that's a slightly different phenomenon; there are no flat-earth arguments that are "clever", at best they are confusing.
Modern medicine is sufficiently complicated that a logical case can, with effort, be constructed against it (albeit one that is pretty easy to demolish by someone of equal intelligence to the edifice's designer). The earth's roundness, on the other hand, has been settled science for thousands of years.
Broadly agreed, and that’s why I assigned flat-earth arguments to the extreme end of the spectrum.
Sorry, can’t help this one: their arguments can be both confusingly clever and cleverly confusing. :)
> Maybe we should skip it - I never see any adults with obviously mis-shapen heads out there
For anecdotal evidence, I had a friend in middle school with this issue. It's less noticable as an adult (possibly he learned to hide it better with haircuts or something? Or maybe it just got milder naturally), so you might not notice it passing him on the street but you probably would if you were sitting down for a conversation with him. I don't think the helmets were available back then.
I also know some people like this. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I might have done double-takes and stared a little on first encounters.
Thanks. I'm terrible at noticing things about people, so if other people can detect this then I'm happy to defer to their expertise.