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There’s a lot of room for survivorship bias in this rosy picture... A classic counter example is how long it took for hand hygiene to be accepted as an importa

There’s a lot of room for survivorship bias in this rosy picture... A classic counter example is how long it took for hand hygiene to be accepted as an important aspect of medical practice. The cost was just about zero. The benefit: thousands of human lives saved. Still took a hell of a long time.

nkoren 7y ago
Survivorship bias is absolutely right. Technology adoption really doesn't work that way. Another example: scurvy. Known to be cured by lemons since 1601; took 200 years and the better part of two million lives for this news to be properly disseminated.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy
- cdirkx 7y ago
  But that article mentions that lemons can only be stored a limited amount of time, thus requiring restocking during long voyages. However the infrastructure for that wasnt there yet, only those 200 years later it is mentioned that "Spain's large empire and many ports of call made it easier to acquire fresh fruit" and enabling the first long distance expedition without scurvy. Still looks partially like a cost/benefit thing (even though there were indeed many doctors not believing lemons were the cure and instead prescribing "fizzy drinks" with sulpheric acid).
pron 7y ago
That's a good example, but I'd say that it's a relatively unusual case. There, the technology's customers were other scientists (more precisely, people-of-science), and so what was required to convince them was empirical evidence. But even though empirical evidence was exactly what Semmelweis had, they still wouldn't believe him. Another example would be anti-vaxxers today. Here too, though, we have a special case. The technology was so successful that people forgot how bad of a problem it solved. Interestingly, in these cases my statement about lack of success implying lack of benefit is wrong, but these are the very cases where the benefit is easily proven empirically.

nkoren 7y ago

Survivorship bias is absolutely right. Technology adoption really doesn't work that way. Another example: scurvy. Known to be cured by lemons since 1601; took 200 years and the better part of two million lives for this news to be properly disseminated.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

cdirkx 7y ago
But that article mentions that lemons can only be stored a limited amount of time, thus requiring restocking during long voyages. However the infrastructure for that wasnt there yet, only those 200 years later it is mentioned that "Spain's large empire and many ports of call made it easier to acquire fresh fruit" and enabling the first long distance expedition without scurvy. Still looks partially like a cost/benefit thing (even though there were indeed many doctors not believing lemons were the cure and instead prescribing "fizzy drinks" with sulpheric acid).

pron 7y ago

That's a good example, but I'd say that it's a relatively unusual case. There, the technology's customers were other scientists (more precisely, people-of-science), and so what was required to convince them was empirical evidence. But even though empirical evidence was exactly what Semmelweis had, they still wouldn't believe him. Another example would be anti-vaxxers today. Here too, though, we have a special case. The technology was so successful that people forgot how bad of a problem it solved. Interestingly, in these cases my statement about lack of success implying lack of benefit is wrong, but these are the very cases where the benefit is easily proven empirically.