3 ms·

It's important to recognize the difference between deductive and inductive logic. Much of academia, from lit reviews to citations to the way people are trained

It's important to recognize the difference between deductive and inductive logic. Much of academia, from lit reviews to citations to the way people are trained and educated, is inherently based upon appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy only insofar as you're considering purely deductive logic, in the sense that a statement "X believes Y, therefore Y" is not formally valid. That doesn't mean the beliefs of authorities in a field are not valid informally as pieces of evidence. Whether or not medical consensus has been more predictive than a coin flip historically is an empirical claim. I have no idea if it's true, but that seems doubtful. It's particularly interesting to cite penicillin as an example of medical authorities being wrong. Child mortality has dropped more than a hundredfold in the United States since the invention of penicillin. Not that penicillin is solely responsible for that, but I have to question whether possibly negative developmental effects you are trying to cite here really offsets the negative effects of children having potentially deadly infections. I had a severe case of pneumonia when I was 5 and would have died if not for antibiotics. Death is surely the worst possible negative developmental effect.

iamadog55 5y ago
You're putting words in my mouth. I said as blind as a coinflip. And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.

iamadog55 5y ago

You're putting words in my mouth. I said as blind as a coinflip. And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.