6 ms·
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
by whichdan 8y ago
Let's not perpetuate more of the bias and sexism that the article is talking about.
- mrybczyn 8y agoSex differences in the genetic sense exist, and are founded on physics, chemistry and biology. Let's not hide from them either, veiled behind ideological double-speak. Balance.
- Spivak 8y agoNot sexist: "Women on average have a higher rate of mood disorders." Sexist: "I'm going to be more skeptical of this particular woman's experience because she's a woman and probably is just hysterical."
- yasp 8y agoSuppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?
- Retric 8y agoBayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks. Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.
- yasp 8y agoThis exact case is discussed in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" [0]. [0] http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
- Retric 8y agoThat's describing probabilities of truth, not the correct responses to those probables. I did not say false positives or false negatives etc, I simply said the post diagnosis odds. Doctors and patients have little reason to care about odds directly they care about Risk which is ~= odds * harm. Odds going from say 10 to 15% or 0.015% to 0.02% don't have big impacts on your net Risk.
- yasp 8y agoGood point
- tomp 8y agoThat's exactly what Bayesian reasoning is. The other time I went to the doctor to complain about back pain, and get an appointment for a physio. The doctor asked me to do some movements that didn't seem directly related to my issues. Then she explained that they have to check for a specific condition (like a spinal bulge or something) that, albeit very rare, absolutely needs to be operated on as soon as possible.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Dove 8y agoRational, yes; fair, no. Group differences are real, and burying or ignoring that truth is doomed to failure, since it is obvious. However, we have a moral responsibility to evaluate every person as an individual - to give each the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how people who look like them tend to behave. I myself think this is a two way street. If you belong to a group with a particular characteristic and you're an exception, you may need to make an effort to make that explicit - with a statement, via behavior, via dress. And it is not evil when people make assumptions about you; it's understandable. At the same time, we should try to be fair to everyone, to keep in mind that exceptions exist to every rule, and to allow others to change our first perceptions of them easily. I think this approach walks the line between truth and justice, though I am certainly open to hearing a better strategy.
- yasp 8y agoUnfortunately there is another dimension here which is that we're allocating a scarce resource (medical care). If one group has significantly higher rates of hypocondria (again, I don't know for sure whether this is true, but assume for argument's sake that it is), and we're forced to treat everyone as an individual (i.e. ignore this fact), then this necessarily deprives other groups of resources (medical care).
- tehwebguy 8y agoI think the point is simply that if you walk in properly (appointment / insurance / etc) you should be properly diagnosed.
- dagw 8y agoIs it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly? Not without having very detailed information on exactly how big the difference is and, equally important, how these differences are distributed within each sub-population.
- yasp 8y agoSo Bayesianism is good but only sometimes?
- dagw 8y agoBayesian reasoning is good when applied rigorously, but can be dangerous when applied sloppily and lazily, since people are terrible at subjectively estimating probabilities and tend to be way over optimistic when updating their priors with any new information they receive. Basically people will treat information that should realistically cause them to update their priors from 50-50 to 51-49 as if it was information that should cause them to update to 80-20 (and then they round off too 100-0).
- tptacek 8y agoComments like this don't say anything. Obviously sex differences "in the genetic sense" exist; we have different sets of organs to prove it. That doesn't mean every attribute assigned to women on message boards is worth entertaining.
- bluGill 8y agoWhich of those really exist though? I fully agree they exist, but it is very hard to separate which are just culture from those that are real differences. You can measure hormone differences of course, and there are other measurable things, but you quickly get into measurable differences but no idea if they are nature or nurture.
- tomp 8y ago> A 2013 review found that groups associated with higher levels of neuroticism are young adults who are at high risk for mood disorders and women. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism Edit: this isn't to say that there isn't a bias... maybe doctors know this already, but assume that the effect is bigger than it is? Alternatively, they don't know this, and could treat their patients better if they had known. In any case, nothing good comes from denying the truth.
- rich-and-poor 8y agoWomen _are_ on average more neurotic than men. You don't get to shoo-shoo the facts away.