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People wanting concrete answers is a good force. Authorities saying "We don't know" is also a good force. Combine these two good forces and you end up with "Le
by zug_zug 3y ago
People wanting concrete answers is a good force. Authorities saying "We don't know" is also a good force.
Combine these two good forces and you end up with "Let's do some more research" which is what we need more of. "Is autism actually going up in the US? We don't actually know, and instead of bayesian hedging, let's construct some studies that definitively answer that."
- hnfong 3y agoIn my comment I originally considered writing "people want concrete answers, now"... I totally agree that for important issues more research is always needed when one needs to resort to Bayesian analysis, but sometimes for policy reasons somebody needs to make a decision quick and they can't wait 2 more years for indisputable evidence. COVID is a good example, governments can't just say let's wait for two years and see what happens... Even for the autism example, even if authorities only find a substantial but not definite likelihood that autism is going up, they are supposed to prepare for policies that might help alleviate the problem, instead of waiting it to become a definite problem and then fixing it after the fact. For example, let's say chemical X is deemed to have 80% chance of causing increased autism, it's hard to argue we should wait until it's 99% before restricting the use of X. Of course if it turns out upon more research the likelihood is closer to 0% the policy can be reversed.