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Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you t

Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. It just means they have an inflammation of the bronchi. It says nothing of the direct cause, nor the indirect cause: a virus, tobacco, dust, air pollution or asthma. It says nothing about how bad it is. They don't even know really what it implies for their body or their treatment. But now they think they know. Call something a democracy, and nobody will check if it is. Call something a privilege, and people will start to want it, working hard for it. Models can be used to help your interact with the world. But they are also used to avoid interacting with the world: if you use them as labels, instead of comparing the model with reality, you get a shortcut to take decisions. It becomes a mere name to justify a decision process instead of a tool for the decision process.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago
>If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. In the The Imaginary Invalid (17th century) Molliere makes fun of it. Doctor explains how opium works through its "dormitive virtue."
mattkrause 7y ago
I'm not sure I agree. While technically bronchitis could be any inflammation of the brochial tubes, a diagnosis of bronchitis usually means that that it's the patient's major problem. It'd be odd to describe a cancer as "bronchitis" even if it involved brochi. So you do learn something, in a Griceian sense, from the relatively uninformative diagnosis. There's also the implication that there are some tools for managing it, the doctor's seen it before, etc all of which are reassuring.
dchyrdvh 7y ago
"Mind is the great destroyer of reality" - a quote from one of those ancient dusty books. Our mind is a machine that creates models and labels for everything, to avoid dealing with the illigible reality.
dennis_jeeves 7y ago
>If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. Agreed, on the medical front this also leads to a focus on sophisticated diagnostic tools and numbers versus a 'true' cure. >Call something a democracy, and nobody will check if it is. >Call something a privilege, and people will start to want it, working hard for it. Let me add one more to the list. Call something a 'right' and people feel denied if they are not given it. Eg. voting rights. Even where one can vote, consent is generally manufactured but people feel empowered when they vote.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  "Gun rights" are totally bogus. Let's enumerate rights: "Life." Okay. "Liberty." Gotcha. "Pursuit of happiness." Yep. "Private property." Might need some asterisks on that one, but sure. "Carry a weapon around in case I might need to murder another human being very quickly." ??? It's been this incredible PR campaign based around the fact that people are illiterate and don't know what "bear arms" means (jargon for "serve in a militia"[1].) [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43559 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43559
  - dennis_jeeves 7y ago
    Not sure if you were in agreement with me, being sarcastic, or nitpicking. But the history of comments is certainly not dull. Look at my profile, and see if the link mentioned in it catch your fancy, if it does, shoot me an email.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    The actual right is to self-defense - itself a derivative of other fundamental rights. Access to effective means of self-defense follows from there, just as abstract freedom of speech has many derivative rights like freedom of the press.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      An abstract right to freedom of thought allows for extensive time and place restrictions plus libel laws, etc. The right to self-defense (which I will concede) allows for restrictions on weapon ownership and usage.
earthboundkid 7y ago
Medicine is super-bad about not being able to tell a symptom from a disease. A lot of "diseases" are just symptoms with Latin names and a set of empirical remedies. Psychology in particular seems to have come to the conclusion that if you can name an assortment of 4 out of 10 symptoms, that counts as having identified single disease. I think part of the problem is that we're so good at applying various techniques that no one bothers to think anymore.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  'Medicine' being a stand-in for 'diagnosis'? Because medical research is all about underlying causes these days. Maybe 50 years ago it was just a corpus of traditional cures. But those days are gone.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well historically the symptom /was/ the disease effectively without imaging to meaningfully separate "appeasing the spirits by ritual boiling" vs "killing microbes". To go with a niche mixed metaphor part of the issue is epistemological low resolution. If the extended "senses" and knowledge are lacking everything is imprecise. One path of medicine closest to that sort of symptom vs disease separation being practical is phage therapy. It could be called true alternative medicine as an actual alternative as opposed to a euphemism for "false or unproven" but is generally less practical in spite of its other virtues. Because a proper phage needs to be selected per target pathogen. As opposed to not caring what strain of virus it is and just treating the symptoms so the patient can recover and not die.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago

>If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. In the The Imaginary Invalid (17th century) Molliere makes fun of it. Doctor explains how opium works through its "dormitive virtue."

mattkrause 7y ago

I'm not sure I agree. While technically bronchitis could be any inflammation of the brochial tubes, a diagnosis of bronchitis usually means that that it's the patient's major problem. It'd be odd to describe a cancer as "bronchitis" even if it involved brochi. So you do learn something, in a Griceian sense, from the relatively uninformative diagnosis. There's also the implication that there are some tools for managing it, the doctor's seen it before, etc all of which are reassuring.

dchyrdvh 7y ago

"Mind is the great destroyer of reality" - a quote from one of those ancient dusty books. Our mind is a machine that creates models and labels for everything, to avoid dealing with the illigible reality.

dennis_jeeves 7y ago

>If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. Agreed, on the medical front this also leads to a focus on sophisticated diagnostic tools and numbers versus a 'true' cure. >Call something a democracy, and nobody will check if it is. >Call something a privilege, and people will start to want it, working hard for it. Let me add one more to the list. Call something a 'right' and people feel denied if they are not given it. Eg. voting rights. Even where one can vote, consent is generally manufactured but people feel empowered when they vote.

earthboundkid 7y ago
"Gun rights" are totally bogus. Let's enumerate rights: "Life." Okay. "Liberty." Gotcha. "Pursuit of happiness." Yep. "Private property." Might need some asterisks on that one, but sure. "Carry a weapon around in case I might need to murder another human being very quickly." ??? It's been this incredible PR campaign based around the fact that people are illiterate and don't know what "bear arms" means (jargon for "serve in a militia"[1].) [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43559 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43559
- dennis_jeeves 7y ago
  Not sure if you were in agreement with me, being sarcastic, or nitpicking. But the history of comments is certainly not dull. Look at my profile, and see if the link mentioned in it catch your fancy, if it does, shoot me an email.
- int_19h 7y ago
  The actual right is to self-defense - itself a derivative of other fundamental rights. Access to effective means of self-defense follows from there, just as abstract freedom of speech has many derivative rights like freedom of the press.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    An abstract right to freedom of thought allows for extensive time and place restrictions plus libel laws, etc. The right to self-defense (which I will concede) allows for restrictions on weapon ownership and usage.

earthboundkid 7y ago

Medicine is super-bad about not being able to tell a symptom from a disease. A lot of "diseases" are just symptoms with Latin names and a set of empirical remedies. Psychology in particular seems to have come to the conclusion that if you can name an assortment of 4 out of 10 symptoms, that counts as having identified single disease. I think part of the problem is that we're so good at applying various techniques that no one bothers to think anymore.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
'Medicine' being a stand-in for 'diagnosis'? Because medical research is all about underlying causes these days. Maybe 50 years ago it was just a corpus of traditional cures. But those days are gone.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Well historically the symptom /was/ the disease effectively without imaging to meaningfully separate "appeasing the spirits by ritual boiling" vs "killing microbes". To go with a niche mixed metaphor part of the issue is epistemological low resolution. If the extended "senses" and knowledge are lacking everything is imprecise. One path of medicine closest to that sort of symptom vs disease separation being practical is phage therapy. It could be called true alternative medicine as an actual alternative as opposed to a euphemism for "false or unproven" but is generally less practical in spite of its other virtues. Because a proper phage needs to be selected per target pathogen. As opposed to not caring what strain of virus it is and just treating the symptoms so the patient can recover and not die.