6 ms·

I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. Let's take the security guard: "The only problem is: he now provides literally

I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. Let's take the security guard: "The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it." That is blatantly not true, the guard provide value since the wanna-be robbers don't know whether the guard will be of any value, and a rock could not provide any deterrent. Losslessly? The doctor (if there is someone skeptical of doctors it is me, if I were less lazy I would have greatly enjoyed fighting to make some useless US dermatologists lose their license): "Her heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, but she provides literally no value. There is no point to her existence. She could be profitably replaced with a rock saying “IT’S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY”. This is an unhelpful caricature, too, because if we add "and call back if it does not", it looks like a very reasonable approach. Un-nuanced and quite sloppy presentation of heuristics.

vasco 5y ago
Maybe we should replace you with a "THIS NEW IDEA ISN'T NUANCED ENOUGH TO REPRESENT THE WORLD" rock.
amflare 5y ago
I agree with you. The value of the heuristic is in the 99.9% and the value of the person is in the 0.01%. That's why doctors are so valuable. It's for those times when someone comes back and says, "It didn't work." If we waste the doctor's time on the 99.9%, then they lose their primary function of being the expert during the unexpected. For an individual, they may seem interchangeable with a rock, but for a society, they are not. This is because while the probability of cancer per unit of human doesn't change (enough to matter for this illustration), the more people there are, the probability of cancer per unit of time does increase. 0.01% of a lot is still something. Crucially, however, the security guard and doctor are roles that have value in their responsive nature. Then you have the part of the article where you are talking about roles that have value in their predictive nature. And for those, yeah, the author has a point.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > If we waste the doctor's time on the 99.9%, then they lose their primary function of being the expert during the unexpected. I don't agree that this is a waste of time. The reason why we go to the doctor when we have unusual pains and aches is because we are not qualified to decide whether it's a minor annoyance or a symptom of a life-altering problem. We're seeking out an expert to help make that determination. If two people could walk in with the same described symptoms, but one just ate something that disagreed with them, and the other has stomach cancer, then doctors must do at least a basic diagnostic exam on the spot, and not turn the patient away for days or weeks to see if the problem goes away on its own. This isn't a "waste" of time at all. I just saw a PA a couple weeks ago about a knee injury. The end result was that she did tell me to take ibuprofen for a few weeks and then report in how it feels. But, before that, she spent a good 20 minutes asking about the history of the injury, and then felt around to see if there was anything noticeably wrong. And after that she gave me an idea of what the next steps would be if it doesn't get better on its own. The entire experience gave me confidence that she was attentive to what I had to say, knew what she was talking about, and had a plan in case things don't get better. If she had merely listened to me for 5 minutes, and then told me to take ibuprofen for a few weeks and call back if it's not better, and that was it, I would not have felt good about that encounter, and would have gotten a second opinion from another doctor. Of course, this also raises the question of whether or not doctors who put in that bare-minimum, insufficient amount of effort (as described in the article) actually are common. I really hope they aren't! But maybe they are, I dunno. The author is a medical professional (albeit on the mental health side), so I would expect he'd have a better idea of how common that is than I do.
kelnos 5y ago
I agree with your take on the doctor heuristic. But there is also the worry that the patient won't call back for longer than they should, and the underlying disease could have a chance to get a lot worse in that time. If a doctor really isn't doing any basic diagnostic work, and is just telling people "take some aspirin, and call back if it doesn't go away after X days", that is still IMO negligent. If I have cancer, I don't want to wait 2 weeks or a month longer than necessary to start treatment. That could be the difference between life and death. On the security guard, you're right, but I think it's still interesting to think about. If the security guard really does just assume any noise heard is not robbers, then they are effectively not doing anything. Their deterrence value is non-zero, agreed, but maybe it's cheaper and more productive to install motion-activated security cameras at ingress points, and big honkin' signs at the perimeter that say "Security monitoring in effect 24/7". Yes, you have to pay for the monitoring, but that's probably cheaper than paying for a butt-in-seat. And safer, too! Most security guards at most places probably aren't trained for much beyond the basics. I think it's more likely than not that someone will get hurt if robbers do show up and a security guard gets involved. I would much rather some stuff get stolen than people get hurt. (Certainly there are some things that are critical enough that require a well-trained security force. I just think these things are less common than most people would think.) > Un-nuanced and quite sloppy presentation of heuristics. I think the lack of nuance is in part the point. We should be examining places in our lives where we go by our gut feeling, or by the common case, when we probably should actually be doing research, diagnosis, or testing. Even if the results aren't as dire as some of the non-nuanced takes, they're still bad enough to warrant some thought.
dragontamer 5y ago
The Hydroxychloroquine discussion is pretty bad as well. We were confidently against Hydroxychloroquine because it was well tested in the RECOVERY trial in June 2020 [1]. The time to be optimistic was during the trial-phase of the test. Once that time passed, everything beyond that point was unnecessary and unhelpful hype. ------ What's amazing to me, is that the RECOVERY trials showed that Dexamethasone cut the death rates in half [2]. Where did the Dexamethasone hype go? Why was the political discussion on the snake-oil Hydroxychloroquine? Even months before we had a vaccine, doctors had discovered how to save roughly 10% of lives in the most severe category. (29.3% death rate vs. 41.4% death rate for those on ventilators). Doctors quickly started using the $20 steroid to save so many lived throughout the pandemic. Instead of hyping the stuff that _WORKED_, the political system was hyping snake-oil like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Why were so many people optimistic on such bullshit? ------ Here is where being skeptical helps. Whenever Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin came up in a stupid discussion, I'd pivot the discussion towards Dexamethasone and Monoclonal antibodies. People need hope. People want hope. Before we had vaccines, people wanted to know that doctors had an idea of what to do. Dexamethasone and Monoclonal Antibodies did the job and did it properly (saving lives long before vaccines were developed). No one cared if it was "hydroxychloroquine" or "dexamethasone", these are all just giant chemical that few people memorize. People wanted hope, and it was important we kept that hope factually correct. You can't promise the world with bullshit snake oil. When someone gets COVID19, they'll demand Ivermectin (yes, my sister is a doctor and she's seeing patients who are literally dying and demanding Ivermectin from her). Ivermectin has given these people false hope and is turning them away from the actual care that would save them. [1]: https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/statement-from-the-chief-investigators-of-the-randomised-evaluation-of-covid-19-therapy-recovery-trial-on-hydroxychloroquine-5-june-2020-no-clinical-benefit-from-use-of-hydroxychloroquine-in-hospitalised-patients-with-covid-19 https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/statement-from-the-chief-... [2]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2021436 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2021436
- zerocrates 5y ago
  Perhaps it's the very fact that dexamethasone was useful (and therefore used) that explains why you never hear about it. Since you mentioned the political context, it's not necessarily just "something that works" that you're looking for in a political sense, but "something that works that THEY don't want you to have." If everyone agrees on it, there's no action, no wedge. The fact that most people are going to recover anyway is also fertile ground for snake oil, as everyone runs their own uncontrolled experiment and declares success when they survive, and most do.
manmal 5y ago
At least in the case of the doctor, the numbers are also way off. A typical doctor sees thousands, if not tens of thousands of patients in their career. This would certainly translate to _way_ more than two or three misdiagnosed cancers.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  Definitely. I suppose it's like an on-call engineer with a dodgy metric that "cries wolf" very regularly. There are hundreds of deadly conditions that have "flu-like symptoms", cancers that manifest in a myriad different ways (from anemia to blurred vision), and other serious conditions that start out as plain old lethargy or listlessness and get diagnosed as depression. I have encountered a complacent doctor who misdiagnosed my sister's cancer as "pain" (??) prescribing pain killers for weeks while the cancer spread and additional symptoms appeared. [Edit: I misremembered as months not weeks, but it was about 6 weeks]. (She died). My father is 95 years old, and had extremely low blood pressure for months, making him constantly sleepy. My mother accidentally made the discovery after she bought a blood pressure monitor for my sister (who has high blood pressure). They took him off the medication, and he's back outside chopping small pieces of firewood and taking short walks. As far as the doctor was concerned he was tired because he was old, and his body was "winding down like an old clock". Too lazy to take his fucking blood pressure. Doctors get extremely complacent, burnt-out, depressed etc. They frequently miss the 1:1000 time that the symptoms are something serious, so I literally never trust a doctor to make a diagnosis without carrying out actual tests. If I'm ever ill enough to need one, I'll have done my own research before visiting one. I don't care if it pisses them off.
hacknat 5y ago
Are you reading the deeper lesson though? The individual examples aren't meant to be authoritative. He was trying to illustrate the very thing you are bringing up. Namely that lazy heuristics create information cascades. The information cascades can have positive effects, as you point out, but they can have profoundly negative consequences, which is the point of the whole article. We shouldn't use or intellectually tolerate lazy heuristics because they can create immense amounts of counter-productive sense-making, and consequent negative social outcomes (a poorly managed pandemic, for example). The reason this article is hitting a nerve is because he is basically describing the current state of sense-making in the US (and maybe even the West more broadly?), which is quite poor — worse in some areas than others, but still quite degraded all around. On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?
- glenstein 5y ago
  Right. I think it has to be boiled down to a simple parable to be sufficiently clear, but it is really attacking a belief that is quite common. I like this essay on Overconfident Pessimism[0] because I think it gets at the same thing, especially in the context of confident dismissals of important future technological changes: >There may also be a psychological double standard for "positive" and "negative" predictions. Skepticism about confident positive predictions — say, that AI will be invented soon — feels like the virtuous doubt of standard scientific training. But oddly enough, making confident negative predictions — say, that AI will not be invented soon — also feels like virtuous doubt, merely because the first prediction was phrased positively and the second was phrase negatively. [0]. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvdYK8sEFqHqHLRqN/overconfident-pessimism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvdYK8sEFqHqHLRqN/overconfid...
- borroka 5y ago
  "On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?" -- Your observation is indeed much more interesting than the whole article, since it shows a reasonable (and not a caricature with zero value) heuristic. You are saying that I (who may or may not be a physician, but for argument's sake let's say I am not) should not have an opinion that is different, when discussing the behavior of doctors, from the opinion expressed by a licensed and practicing physician. Valuable heuristic? As for the article itself, my problem with is was not on the problems that reasonable heuristic can generate, but with the useless caricatures. A doctor who does not visit any patient and simply gives aways a couple of aspirins, is criminally negligent. A doctor who does not call for an MRI for any common symptoms (think headache) that may have been caused, among many other possible causes (dehydration, stress, tension etc.), also by something much more serious (brain cancer) is using a reasonable heuristic, which sometimes may go wrong because for very aggressive cancers, a couple of weeks of delay in starting treatment or having surgery can make the difference between life and death. A personal case. I went to a doctor with a dermatitis and the doctor recommended, guess what?, a topical steroid cream, which is recommended by dermatologist like a barber recommends a haircut. The heuristic is, dermatitis of unclear origins --> let's try a steroid cream. After I did a bit of research on my own (5 minutes, maybe less), I found out that for my conditions the steroid cream should be absolutely avoided since it makes the condition worse. The question is and I let you choose the answer: (1) was the doctor using a reasonable heuristic?; (2) was the doctor incompetent and/or an idiot; (3) was the doctor negligent (there is some overlap with (2))? Should I wait for the opinion of a "licensed and practicing Physician" or I can have my opinion?
Spinnaker_ 5y ago
You have a very weird idea of what security guards do. They don't sit in front of the entrance all night, scaring off would-be robbers. They are inside the building, in their booth, probably looking over some monitors. They do not provide a deterrent, they just call the cops if something does happen. Robbers have no clue if they are there or not. The heuristic works fine.
- presentation 5y ago
  There are plenty of places with visible security guards.
- zerocrates 5y ago
  Well, robbers might in fact know if a particular place has security guards, and they would definitely notice once society replaced them all with rocks.
  - 6510 5y ago
    If they replaced them with rocks its probably not worth robbing the place. I mean, it says so on the rock?
- borroka 5y ago
  I have a very clear idea of what security guards do and I don't know where you got that I believe they "sit in front of the entrance all night" (which they do very often in South America, by the way, among other locations). Any "reasonable robber", which means maybe not your early teen looking for some adrenaline or the out-of-their-mind tweakers, knows or checks whether there are any security guards in a building in which they intend to make a robbery.
  - cryptonym 5y ago
    You may attract lot more robbers if anyone can easily know there is no security guard but just a stone.
- protontorpedo 5y ago
rendaw 5y ago
It wouldn't change much if the rock said "IT'S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY AND CALL THIS NUMBER IF IT DOES NOT"
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  So where can I found the trial for rock-based medical care?
- kamaal 5y ago
  I know of a doctor who gave a seminar at our workplace. His case was. The cure for most non serious illness, is mostly to wait. Not even medication. This is why most people think homeopathy works.
coldtea 5y ago
>I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. That about sums up the whole movement AstralCodex is part of.
jvanderbot 5y ago
Exactly this. Null-confirming signals should not be considered evidence to discard the null hypothesis. Decision trees are OK, esp those that have "wait and see" near the root. These derogatory calls to action and flame-posts against arbitrary "experts" are just tiring. Bring the evidence.

vasco 5y ago

Maybe we should replace you with a "THIS NEW IDEA ISN'T NUANCED ENOUGH TO REPRESENT THE WORLD" rock.

amflare 5y ago

I agree with you. The value of the heuristic is in the 99.9% and the value of the person is in the 0.01%. That's why doctors are so valuable. It's for those times when someone comes back and says, "It didn't work." If we waste the doctor's time on the 99.9%, then they lose their primary function of being the expert during the unexpected. For an individual, they may seem interchangeable with a rock, but for a society, they are not. This is because while the probability of cancer per unit of human doesn't change (enough to matter for this illustration), the more people there are, the probability of cancer per unit of time does increase. 0.01% of a lot is still something. Crucially, however, the security guard and doctor are roles that have value in their responsive nature. Then you have the part of the article where you are talking about roles that have value in their predictive nature. And for those, yeah, the author has a point.

kelnos 5y ago
> If we waste the doctor's time on the 99.9%, then they lose their primary function of being the expert during the unexpected. I don't agree that this is a waste of time. The reason why we go to the doctor when we have unusual pains and aches is because we are not qualified to decide whether it's a minor annoyance or a symptom of a life-altering problem. We're seeking out an expert to help make that determination. If two people could walk in with the same described symptoms, but one just ate something that disagreed with them, and the other has stomach cancer, then doctors must do at least a basic diagnostic exam on the spot, and not turn the patient away for days or weeks to see if the problem goes away on its own. This isn't a "waste" of time at all. I just saw a PA a couple weeks ago about a knee injury. The end result was that she did tell me to take ibuprofen for a few weeks and then report in how it feels. But, before that, she spent a good 20 minutes asking about the history of the injury, and then felt around to see if there was anything noticeably wrong. And after that she gave me an idea of what the next steps would be if it doesn't get better on its own. The entire experience gave me confidence that she was attentive to what I had to say, knew what she was talking about, and had a plan in case things don't get better. If she had merely listened to me for 5 minutes, and then told me to take ibuprofen for a few weeks and call back if it's not better, and that was it, I would not have felt good about that encounter, and would have gotten a second opinion from another doctor. Of course, this also raises the question of whether or not doctors who put in that bare-minimum, insufficient amount of effort (as described in the article) actually are common. I really hope they aren't! But maybe they are, I dunno. The author is a medical professional (albeit on the mental health side), so I would expect he'd have a better idea of how common that is than I do.

kelnos 5y ago

I agree with your take on the doctor heuristic. But there is also the worry that the patient won't call back for longer than they should, and the underlying disease could have a chance to get a lot worse in that time. If a doctor really isn't doing any basic diagnostic work, and is just telling people "take some aspirin, and call back if it doesn't go away after X days", that is still IMO negligent. If I have cancer, I don't want to wait 2 weeks or a month longer than necessary to start treatment. That could be the difference between life and death. On the security guard, you're right, but I think it's still interesting to think about. If the security guard really does just assume any noise heard is not robbers, then they are effectively not doing anything. Their deterrence value is non-zero, agreed, but maybe it's cheaper and more productive to install motion-activated security cameras at ingress points, and big honkin' signs at the perimeter that say "Security monitoring in effect 24/7". Yes, you have to pay for the monitoring, but that's probably cheaper than paying for a butt-in-seat. And safer, too! Most security guards at most places probably aren't trained for much beyond the basics. I think it's more likely than not that someone will get hurt if robbers do show up and a security guard gets involved. I would much rather some stuff get stolen than people get hurt. (Certainly there are some things that are critical enough that require a well-trained security force. I just think these things are less common than most people would think.) > Un-nuanced and quite sloppy presentation of heuristics. I think the lack of nuance is in part the point. We should be examining places in our lives where we go by our gut feeling, or by the common case, when we probably should actually be doing research, diagnosis, or testing. Even if the results aren't as dire as some of the non-nuanced takes, they're still bad enough to warrant some thought.

dragontamer 5y ago

The Hydroxychloroquine discussion is pretty bad as well. We were confidently against Hydroxychloroquine because it was well tested in the RECOVERY trial in June 2020 [1]. The time to be optimistic was during the trial-phase of the test. Once that time passed, everything beyond that point was unnecessary and unhelpful hype. ------ What's amazing to me, is that the RECOVERY trials showed that Dexamethasone cut the death rates in half [2]. Where did the Dexamethasone hype go? Why was the political discussion on the snake-oil Hydroxychloroquine? Even months before we had a vaccine, doctors had discovered how to save roughly 10% of lives in the most severe category. (29.3% death rate vs. 41.4% death rate for those on ventilators). Doctors quickly started using the $20 steroid to save so many lived throughout the pandemic. Instead of hyping the stuff that _WORKED_, the political system was hyping snake-oil like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Why were so many people optimistic on such bullshit? ------ Here is where being skeptical helps. Whenever Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin came up in a stupid discussion, I'd pivot the discussion towards Dexamethasone and Monoclonal antibodies. People need hope. People want hope. Before we had vaccines, people wanted to know that doctors had an idea of what to do. Dexamethasone and Monoclonal Antibodies did the job and did it properly (saving lives long before vaccines were developed). No one cared if it was "hydroxychloroquine" or "dexamethasone", these are all just giant chemical that few people memorize. People wanted hope, and it was important we kept that hope factually correct. You can't promise the world with bullshit snake oil. When someone gets COVID19, they'll demand Ivermectin (yes, my sister is a doctor and she's seeing patients who are literally dying and demanding Ivermectin from her). Ivermectin has given these people false hope and is turning them away from the actual care that would save them. [1]: https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/statement-from-the-chief-investigators-of-the-randomised-evaluation-of-covid-19-therapy-recovery-trial-on-hydroxychloroquine-5-june-2020-no-clinical-benefit-from-use-of-hydroxychloroquine-in-hospitalised-patients-with-covid-19 https://www.recoverytrial.net/news/statement-from-the-chief-... [2]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2021436 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2021436

zerocrates 5y ago
Perhaps it's the very fact that dexamethasone was useful (and therefore used) that explains why you never hear about it. Since you mentioned the political context, it's not necessarily just "something that works" that you're looking for in a political sense, but "something that works that THEY don't want you to have." If everyone agrees on it, there's no action, no wedge. The fact that most people are going to recover anyway is also fertile ground for snake oil, as everyone runs their own uncontrolled experiment and declares success when they survive, and most do.

manmal 5y ago

At least in the case of the doctor, the numbers are also way off. A typical doctor sees thousands, if not tens of thousands of patients in their career. This would certainly translate to _way_ more than two or three misdiagnosed cancers.

raffraffraff 5y ago
Definitely. I suppose it's like an on-call engineer with a dodgy metric that "cries wolf" very regularly. There are hundreds of deadly conditions that have "flu-like symptoms", cancers that manifest in a myriad different ways (from anemia to blurred vision), and other serious conditions that start out as plain old lethargy or listlessness and get diagnosed as depression. I have encountered a complacent doctor who misdiagnosed my sister's cancer as "pain" (??) prescribing pain killers for weeks while the cancer spread and additional symptoms appeared. [Edit: I misremembered as months not weeks, but it was about 6 weeks]. (She died). My father is 95 years old, and had extremely low blood pressure for months, making him constantly sleepy. My mother accidentally made the discovery after she bought a blood pressure monitor for my sister (who has high blood pressure). They took him off the medication, and he's back outside chopping small pieces of firewood and taking short walks. As far as the doctor was concerned he was tired because he was old, and his body was "winding down like an old clock". Too lazy to take his fucking blood pressure. Doctors get extremely complacent, burnt-out, depressed etc. They frequently miss the 1:1000 time that the symptoms are something serious, so I literally never trust a doctor to make a diagnosis without carrying out actual tests. If I'm ever ill enough to need one, I'll have done my own research before visiting one. I don't care if it pisses them off.

hacknat 5y ago

Are you reading the deeper lesson though? The individual examples aren't meant to be authoritative. He was trying to illustrate the very thing you are bringing up. Namely that lazy heuristics create information cascades. The information cascades can have positive effects, as you point out, but they can have profoundly negative consequences, which is the point of the whole article. We shouldn't use or intellectually tolerate lazy heuristics because they can create immense amounts of counter-productive sense-making, and consequent negative social outcomes (a poorly managed pandemic, for example). The reason this article is hitting a nerve is because he is basically describing the current state of sense-making in the US (and maybe even the West more broadly?), which is quite poor — worse in some areas than others, but still quite degraded all around. On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?

glenstein 5y ago
Right. I think it has to be boiled down to a simple parable to be sufficiently clear, but it is really attacking a belief that is quite common. I like this essay on Overconfident Pessimism[0] because I think it gets at the same thing, especially in the context of confident dismissals of important future technological changes: >There may also be a psychological double standard for "positive" and "negative" predictions. Skepticism about confident positive predictions — say, that AI will be invented soon — feels like the virtuous doubt of standard scientific training. But oddly enough, making confident negative predictions — say, that AI will not be invented soon — also feels like virtuous doubt, merely because the first prediction was phrased positively and the second was phrase negatively. [0]. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvdYK8sEFqHqHLRqN/overconfident-pessimism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvdYK8sEFqHqHLRqN/overconfid...
borroka 5y ago
"On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?" -- Your observation is indeed much more interesting than the whole article, since it shows a reasonable (and not a caricature with zero value) heuristic. You are saying that I (who may or may not be a physician, but for argument's sake let's say I am not) should not have an opinion that is different, when discussing the behavior of doctors, from the opinion expressed by a licensed and practicing physician. Valuable heuristic? As for the article itself, my problem with is was not on the problems that reasonable heuristic can generate, but with the useless caricatures. A doctor who does not visit any patient and simply gives aways a couple of aspirins, is criminally negligent. A doctor who does not call for an MRI for any common symptoms (think headache) that may have been caused, among many other possible causes (dehydration, stress, tension etc.), also by something much more serious (brain cancer) is using a reasonable heuristic, which sometimes may go wrong because for very aggressive cancers, a couple of weeks of delay in starting treatment or having surgery can make the difference between life and death. A personal case. I went to a doctor with a dermatitis and the doctor recommended, guess what?, a topical steroid cream, which is recommended by dermatologist like a barber recommends a haircut. The heuristic is, dermatitis of unclear origins --> let's try a steroid cream. After I did a bit of research on my own (5 minutes, maybe less), I found out that for my conditions the steroid cream should be absolutely avoided since it makes the condition worse. The question is and I let you choose the answer: (1) was the doctor using a reasonable heuristic?; (2) was the doctor incompetent and/or an idiot; (3) was the doctor negligent (there is some overlap with (2))? Should I wait for the opinion of a "licensed and practicing Physician" or I can have my opinion?

Spinnaker_ 5y ago

You have a very weird idea of what security guards do. They don't sit in front of the entrance all night, scaring off would-be robbers. They are inside the building, in their booth, probably looking over some monitors. They do not provide a deterrent, they just call the cops if something does happen. Robbers have no clue if they are there or not. The heuristic works fine.

presentation 5y ago
There are plenty of places with visible security guards.
zerocrates 5y ago
Well, robbers might in fact know if a particular place has security guards, and they would definitely notice once society replaced them all with rocks.
- 6510 5y ago
  If they replaced them with rocks its probably not worth robbing the place. I mean, it says so on the rock?
borroka 5y ago
I have a very clear idea of what security guards do and I don't know where you got that I believe they "sit in front of the entrance all night" (which they do very often in South America, by the way, among other locations). Any "reasonable robber", which means maybe not your early teen looking for some adrenaline or the out-of-their-mind tweakers, knows or checks whether there are any security guards in a building in which they intend to make a robbery.
- cryptonym 5y ago
  You may attract lot more robbers if anyone can easily know there is no security guard but just a stone.
protontorpedo 5y ago

rendaw 5y ago

It wouldn't change much if the rock said "IT'S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY AND CALL THIS NUMBER IF IT DOES NOT"

FeepingCreature 5y ago
So where can I found the trial for rock-based medical care?
kamaal 5y ago
I know of a doctor who gave a seminar at our workplace. His case was. The cure for most non serious illness, is mostly to wait. Not even medication. This is why most people think homeopathy works.

coldtea 5y ago

>I read them as sloppy caricatures that provide little value to the conversation. That about sums up the whole movement AstralCodex is part of.

jvanderbot 5y ago

Exactly this. Null-confirming signals should not be considered evidence to discard the null hypothesis. Decision trees are OK, esp those that have "wait and see" near the root. These derogatory calls to action and flame-posts against arbitrary "experts" are just tiring. Bring the evidence.