There you made a slight of hand by exchanging good for health with “there’s little room for doubt that it’s good for health”.
I guess it depends on how much that “room for doubt” translates into being adopted as standard practice (i.e. if doubting the efficacy of vitamin X leads to it not being widely adopted, I might not recommend it either), which leads to
Essesentially, you put wearing a mask in the US in April as non-medical personal into the same category as believing in Fairies.
Basically this—thanks for pointing this out because I agree that’s where my heuristics would have landed me and what actually happened at first, and it’s a big source of my discomfort with this reasoning. That said, why some things are widely adopted or not is generally not that clear-cut to me (e.g. was the reason the lack of evidence or to save masks for healthcare workers?), which is why I just “go with the mainstream flow” in many situations in which I don’t know better. I feel I’m starting to reduce the confidence I put onto health organization/standard guideline statements just because they’re standard, but I’m not sure if there’s something else in heuristic-space I should use to anchor (e.g. believing in Z person?) before getting more information.
That said, why some things are widely adopted or not is generally not that clear-cut to me (e.g. was the reason the lack of evidence or to save masks for healthcare workers?)
There was a lack of evidence (in terms of how EBM sees evidence). There was good pathophysiological reasoning to believe that the masks are helpful. The sane thing to do would been to perscribe masks based on the pathophysiological reasoning. The motivation of saving masks for healthcare workers was one reason not to engage in the sane action.
Looking at more information was not the key to the mask issue. The key was to actually engage in pathophysiological reasoning. I don’t think you can improve on the mainstream flow by simply looking at more sources of information without engaging in reasoning.
The problem with wisdom is that it often can’t be reduced to simply heuristics.
Mentally it’s important to distinguish questions that you can easily answer from questions where it’s hard to know things. The question about whether or not Fearies or Trolls exist is a question for which is easy to answer. In medicine you have a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer and where there no conclusive evidence to answer them either way.
For the reasons EY layed out in Inadequate Equilibria there’s good reason to believe that it’s often possible to improve on standard guidelines for medical questions.
I guess it depends on how much that “room for doubt” translates into being adopted as standard practice (i.e. if doubting the efficacy of vitamin X leads to it not being widely adopted, I might not recommend it either), which leads to
Basically this—thanks for pointing this out because I agree that’s where my heuristics would have landed me and what actually happened at first, and it’s a big source of my discomfort with this reasoning. That said, why some things are widely adopted or not is generally not that clear-cut to me (e.g. was the reason the lack of evidence or to save masks for healthcare workers?), which is why I just “go with the mainstream flow” in many situations in which I don’t know better. I feel I’m starting to reduce the confidence I put onto health organization/standard guideline statements just because they’re standard, but I’m not sure if there’s something else in heuristic-space I should use to anchor (e.g. believing in Z person?) before getting more information.
There was a lack of evidence (in terms of how EBM sees evidence). There was good pathophysiological reasoning to believe that the masks are helpful. The sane thing to do would been to perscribe masks based on the pathophysiological reasoning. The motivation of saving masks for healthcare workers was one reason not to engage in the sane action.
Looking at more information was not the key to the mask issue. The key was to actually engage in pathophysiological reasoning. I don’t think you can improve on the mainstream flow by simply looking at more sources of information without engaging in reasoning.
The problem with wisdom is that it often can’t be reduced to simply heuristics.
Mentally it’s important to distinguish questions that you can easily answer from questions where it’s hard to know things. The question about whether or not Fearies or Trolls exist is a question for which is easy to answer. In medicine you have a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer and where there no conclusive evidence to answer them either way.
For the reasons EY layed out in Inadequate Equilibria there’s good reason to believe that it’s often possible to improve on standard guidelines for medical questions.