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> The medical establishment offers a shiny tempting solution. First, a total unwillingness to trust anything, no matter how plausible it sounds, until it’s gone

by thadt 3y ago

> The medical establishment offers a shiny tempting solution. First, a total unwillingness to trust anything, no matter how plausible it sounds, until it’s gone through an endless cycle of studies and meta-analyses. Isn't this just... science? We learned from the ancient philosophers that really smart people can reason powerfully about a whole lot of things. But - if we want to know whether that reasoning holds up, it has to be tested. Modern science is the current unit testing framework for philosophy. At least, for the thoughts that lend themselves to unit testing.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
It does seem like odd phrasing. It's correct to not fully trust anything until it's gone through a long verification process.
- ketzo 3y ago
  Don't you have to put some amount of trust in an idea to even consider verifying? And have even more trust in the idea to perform your experiments in the first place? Even in medicine, there has to be someone willing to challenge status-quo ideas, or there's nothing to feed into the "long verification process" in the first place. How do you decide when to be that person?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    This seems to be responding to a different comment?
helicalmix 3y ago
One counterexample for why I think it's not always the best approach is that there are sometimes disproportionate rewards for being right when everyone else is wrong. Doing so, however, requires you to take an idea seriously before it has gone through analyses so extensive that everyone else believes the same idea too.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ilovetux 3y ago
You are correct, it is science. The differentiator that I see is that the medical community are under pressure to apply the most cutting edge science in real life-and-death scenarios, so they are uniquely positioned to be burned by trusting a new hypothesis which appears correct but is subtly but completely wrong which could absolutely cause someone to lose their life.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  But the alternative, waiting to apply new-but-actually-correct hypotheses until totally, absolutely proven, also causes lost lives. And as is usual with "Type 1" vs "Type 2" errors, saving lives by avoiding one problem costs lives due to the other problem. The trick is to sit in the minimum of "lives lost due to Type 1 errors plus lives lost due to Type 2 errors". Unfortunately, that's not an analytic function with a known formula and computable derivative...
scotty79 3y ago
Medical thickheadedness sometimes makes them performing useless, harmful procedures for many years after the harm became known. So it's not a virtue the article postulates.
bloaf 3y ago
Right, and I think the distinction he draws between this and engineering is interesting. My experience (as an engineer) is that engineers get paid to manipulate the world around them in precise, predictable ways. As such, they tend to cultivate a core set of relatively simple principles (e.g. heat and material balances) which they take seriously by using to plan/design/etc their manipulations of the world. The engineer's creativity lies in finding new ways to combine the known-reliable principles, and stake their reputation on the result. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to come up with new principles. If they take too many ideas seriously, there is no room left for creative new explanations. Medicine lies somewhere in between, insofar as doctors are trying to manipulate patient's health with the best principles they can find, but they also have to wear a scientists hat via diagnosis, i.e. figuring out which principles to apply to a patient. And so the reaction to e.g. fundamentalism makes sense: An engineer likes having a fundamental set of universal principles, and is comfortable using them to make plans for manipulating the world. They expect the religious world to work the same way as they do, and take those principles seriously. A scientist wants to know "well I've got a new idea for a fundamental principle, how can we find out if I'm right?" And the fundamentalist has no answer. A doctor will want to know how certain the fundamentalist is, and how they know those principles even apply to current situation, and the fundamentalist will have no answer.
broscillator 3y ago
This is all very noble on paper. Yes, people can be persuasive to twist the truth. And testing is good for arriving at proof. But what the ancient philosophers didn't count on, is that there is a machine in charge of what gets tested and how, and that choosing what and how things get tested can also be twisted to be persuasive. I can develop and thoroughly test my own drug, and then persuade you that a much cheaper chemical is not tested enough (because I blocked all attempts at testing it), and then I would point to the noble principles of ancient science as to why things need verification. In other words, the current world is teaching us that really powerful corporations can test selectively about a whole lot of things.
josh_cutler 3y ago
Yes, but not all "scientific" disciplines adhere to this the same way that medicine does. Take for example Psychology, Political Science, or some of Economics where unreplicable studies in prestigious journals almost immediately become cannon for new grad student seminars. N.B. I have direct experience with this in Political Science, the other disciplines I have just anecdotes about so apologies if they are mischaracterized.
gnramires 3y ago
Science is more than just testing, although testing is an important part of science. I believe the reasoning aspect can, in principle, be made strong enough to be robust, and almost independent of experimental confirmation (essentially from analyzing already existing data). For example in Machine Learning you can trust a model to work well in the context of a data stream by simply using (cross) validation, and so on (in general avoiding overfiting, and assuming your data stream will continue your training data without changing too much). Mathematics is an example of a non-experimental science as well: in a way, we can perform purely theoretical experiments where our 'tests' are given by internal consistency. The equivalent of experiments in mathematics for ruling out incorrect statements (inconsistent theories) are proofs and (almost tautologically) the concept of consistency. I think there is some risk that even within math this process derails, but it's only when we start lowering too much the standards for what constitutes a proof. And the concept of proving is so solid we can automate it and computer-verify them. As long as we can (and do) verify what we create, in a sense we can't (or are extremely unlikely to) go off rails. I think relativity is a good example of a theory that was largely conceived from mathematical principles (from a few observed essential properties of reality). I think in the future this kind of approach will be highly significant to physics, math, philosophy and even social sciences. It is true though that experiments (and just real life) are very useful to 'keep us in check' in a general, less rigid way as well. Honestly I think those are the fantastic tool (consistency and proof), fundamentally connected to the notion of truth.

by thadt 3y ago

MichaelZuo 3y ago

It does seem like odd phrasing. It's correct to not fully trust anything until it's gone through a long verification process.

ketzo 3y ago
Don't you have to put some amount of trust in an idea to even consider verifying? And have even more trust in the idea to perform your experiments in the first place? Even in medicine, there has to be someone willing to challenge status-quo ideas, or there's nothing to feed into the "long verification process" in the first place. How do you decide when to be that person?
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  This seems to be responding to a different comment?

helicalmix 3y ago

One counterexample for why I think it's not always the best approach is that there are sometimes disproportionate rewards for being right when everyone else is wrong. Doing so, however, requires you to take an idea seriously before it has gone through analyses so extensive that everyone else believes the same idea too.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ilovetux 3y ago

You are correct, it is science. The differentiator that I see is that the medical community are under pressure to apply the most cutting edge science in real life-and-death scenarios, so they are uniquely positioned to be burned by trusting a new hypothesis which appears correct but is subtly but completely wrong which could absolutely cause someone to lose their life.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
But the alternative, waiting to apply new-but-actually-correct hypotheses until totally, absolutely proven, also causes lost lives. And as is usual with "Type 1" vs "Type 2" errors, saving lives by avoiding one problem costs lives due to the other problem. The trick is to sit in the minimum of "lives lost due to Type 1 errors plus lives lost due to Type 2 errors". Unfortunately, that's not an analytic function with a known formula and computable derivative...

scotty79 3y ago

Medical thickheadedness sometimes makes them performing useless, harmful procedures for many years after the harm became known. So it's not a virtue the article postulates.

bloaf 3y ago

Right, and I think the distinction he draws between this and engineering is interesting. My experience (as an engineer) is that engineers get paid to manipulate the world around them in precise, predictable ways. As such, they tend to cultivate a core set of relatively simple principles (e.g. heat and material balances) which they take seriously by using to plan/design/etc their manipulations of the world. The engineer's creativity lies in finding new ways to combine the known-reliable principles, and stake their reputation on the result. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to come up with new principles. If they take too many ideas seriously, there is no room left for creative new explanations. Medicine lies somewhere in between, insofar as doctors are trying to manipulate patient's health with the best principles they can find, but they also have to wear a scientists hat via diagnosis, i.e. figuring out which principles to apply to a patient. And so the reaction to e.g. fundamentalism makes sense: An engineer likes having a fundamental set of universal principles, and is comfortable using them to make plans for manipulating the world. They expect the religious world to work the same way as they do, and take those principles seriously. A scientist wants to know "well I've got a new idea for a fundamental principle, how can we find out if I'm right?" And the fundamentalist has no answer. A doctor will want to know how certain the fundamentalist is, and how they know those principles even apply to current situation, and the fundamentalist will have no answer.

broscillator 3y ago

This is all very noble on paper. Yes, people can be persuasive to twist the truth. And testing is good for arriving at proof. But what the ancient philosophers didn't count on, is that there is a machine in charge of what gets tested and how, and that choosing what and how things get tested can also be twisted to be persuasive. I can develop and thoroughly test my own drug, and then persuade you that a much cheaper chemical is not tested enough (because I blocked all attempts at testing it), and then I would point to the noble principles of ancient science as to why things need verification. In other words, the current world is teaching us that really powerful corporations can test selectively about a whole lot of things.

josh_cutler 3y ago

Yes, but not all "scientific" disciplines adhere to this the same way that medicine does. Take for example Psychology, Political Science, or some of Economics where unreplicable studies in prestigious journals almost immediately become cannon for new grad student seminars. N.B. I have direct experience with this in Political Science, the other disciplines I have just anecdotes about so apologies if they are mischaracterized.

gnramires 3y ago

Science is more than just testing, although testing is an important part of science. I believe the reasoning aspect can, in principle, be made strong enough to be robust, and almost independent of experimental confirmation (essentially from analyzing already existing data). For example in Machine Learning you can trust a model to work well in the context of a data stream by simply using (cross) validation, and so on (in general avoiding overfiting, and assuming your data stream will continue your training data without changing too much). Mathematics is an example of a non-experimental science as well: in a way, we can perform purely theoretical experiments where our 'tests' are given by internal consistency. The equivalent of experiments in mathematics for ruling out incorrect statements (inconsistent theories) are proofs and (almost tautologically) the concept of consistency. I think there is some risk that even within math this process derails, but it's only when we start lowering too much the standards for what constitutes a proof. And the concept of proving is so solid we can automate it and computer-verify them. As long as we can (and do) verify what we create, in a sense we can't (or are extremely unlikely to) go off rails. I think relativity is a good example of a theory that was largely conceived from mathematical principles (from a few observed essential properties of reality). I think in the future this kind of approach will be highly significant to physics, math, philosophy and even social sciences. It is true though that experiments (and just real life) are very useful to 'keep us in check' in a general, less rigid way as well. Honestly I think those are the fantastic tool (consistency and proof), fundamentally connected to the notion of truth.