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Doing this could be actively worse for you and society based on the false positive rate. Testing and accidental unneeded treatment carry very real risks that co
by daedrdev 1y ago
Doing this could be actively worse for you and society based on the false positive rate. Testing and accidental unneeded treatment carry very real risks that could lead to net suffering and more death or damage if enough people are tested.
- mikert89 1y agoThis is a collectivist opinion on something which is very personal
- rscho 1y agoIt's not personal, it's perfectly rational statistics, i.e. epidemiology. Designing screening strategies is not an amateur's game.
- daedrdev 1y agoWould you take a test if doing so statistically increases your probability of death? Is it moral for a doctor to give a test they think is going to increase someone's chance of death.
- twothreeone 1y agoThat's just wrong. Taking a test doesn't do anything to the data-generating process, your chance of death is 100%. The test merely informs your posterior about the timing of the event.
- rscho 1y agoThe timing is pretty important to most people, and is actually the whole point of taking the test in the first place so the generating process and the test are not independent. See ?! What you said is just wrong too ! ;-)
- surgical_fire 1y agoPublic healthcare policy is absolutely not something personal. It involves costs of healthcare for all people involved, workload on health professionals, hospital occupancy, etc and so forth. If the rate of false positives in these tests are too high, people that need treatment for their actual illnesses might be on a waiting list because too many are doing follow-up screening and biopsies for non-issues. And to address your silly "collectivist" fear-mongering, your hyper-individualist mentality is a societal disease. We could do with some more collectivism, in the sense that people have a better understanding of the constraints and conditions of the society they are inserted in.