For career reasons, I am unable to give a complete answer to this question (see my contact details). I just want to give the general advice that it may be a good idea to beware of people who use the word “science” and the brand name “Harvard” to promote their personal views on questions that are not answerable without long-term randomized trials with perfect adherance (or alternatively strong causal assumptions that are unlikely to hold in these particular settings)
I am not claiming that aspiring rationalists can necessarily do any better, I just want to make the point that it may be better to admit ignorance (or high-variance priors) rather than appealing to the authority of “Harvard”
Noted. To be clear, the question I’m asking is why is OP a more worthy authority than the rest?
Why should we listen to OP and not follow, say, the UK’s NHS healthy living guidelines? I hope the answer is better than “because nobody at the NHS is a member of LW”
For political reasons the NHS couldn’t write things like
In general, you should not assume that medical staff are competent. Triple check dangerous prescriptions. If you don’t know whether a prescription is dangerous, assume it is. Ask medical staff if they’ve washed their hands (yes, this is actually still a major problem). Sharpie on yourself which side of your body a surgery is supposed to happen on, along with your name and what the surgery is for (seriously).
Ditto for these NHS healthy living guidelines. Where do I contradict them?
I had thought my main takeaways were pretty uncontroversial WRT mainstream advice.
For career reasons, I am unable to give a complete answer to this question (see my contact details). I just want to give the general advice that it may be a good idea to beware of people who use the word “science” and the brand name “Harvard” to promote their personal views on questions that are not answerable without long-term randomized trials with perfect adherance (or alternatively strong causal assumptions that are unlikely to hold in these particular settings)
I am not claiming that aspiring rationalists can necessarily do any better, I just want to make the point that it may be better to admit ignorance (or high-variance priors) rather than appealing to the authority of “Harvard”
Noted. To be clear, the question I’m asking is why is OP a more worthy authority than the rest?
Why should we listen to OP and not follow, say, the UK’s NHS healthy living guidelines? I hope the answer is better than “because nobody at the NHS is a member of LW”
For political reasons the NHS couldn’t write things like
Fair point.
Ditto for these NHS healthy living guidelines. Where do I contradict them? I had thought my main takeaways were pretty uncontroversial WRT mainstream advice.