478 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Meta Econ Takeover Day 40 meta
You're right, but it wasn't until Covid that a lot of people became aware of that fact.
I'm thinking about how many people had conversations with their doctors about masks or vaccines or a bunch of other Covid practices that revealed to them that their medical care providers were either hopelessly uninformed or too cowardly to oppose the official position. Whichever one it is, it's a huge breach of trust.
I'm deeply exhausted by all the culture-warring on the topic, so I stopped following the back and forth, but the most comprehensive research I know about is that masks were a good idea, and they remain a good idea. The amount of nonsense that unfolded on that topic defies description. You can't even have a discussion about it anymore. But as always, I welcome credible evidence to the contrary.
Similarly, working near ground zero of how COVID played out in American healthcare, from both the payer and provider sides, I can say I don't fault physicians, as a group, for anything that happened. They were, on net, doing the best they could with the information that they had in the conditions they were in. A lot of criticism looks very different when there are literally people in front of you whose lives you're responsible for, morally and legally. It renders most armchair quarterbacking absurd. Real life tends to do that.
Where I will enthusiastically get on the train is that the whole system is layer upon layer of captured incentives and rot. A bunch of people have gotten very rich rent-seeking. The whole thing needs to burn down. Of course, there will be casualties, literal and metaphorical, when it does.
reply
We probably aren't very far apart here. Although, I don't see much of a case for masking in the way it was done; i.e. extremely prolonged usage. As best as I could follow the research that had been done and that came out during the pandemic, masking is almost completely ineffective against respiratory viruses.
However, that's besides the point I'm making. The issue is that people who tried to do their own research and communicate their concerns to their doctors often discovered that their doctors' knowledge was shockingly lacking. That shattered the widely held illusion that doctors are damn near omniscient.
As a member of the "expert class", it doesn't surprise me at all that an inquisitive lay person could pretty quickly surpass an expert's knowledge on a narrow area that the expert isn't actively looking into. I encounter that pretty much every day just on Stacker News.
I agree with you that the failure is more systemic. Doctors trusted the advice of other medical experts, who trusted the advice of still other experts. In a system like that, it doesn't take too many errors or bad faith actors to cause enormous damage, especially if political pressures are stifling corrective mechanisms.
reply
The issue is that people who tried to do their own research and communicate their concerns to their doctors often discovered that their doctors' knowledge was shockingly lacking. [...] As a member of the "expert class", it doesn't surprise me at all that an inquisitive lay person could pretty quickly surpass an expert's knowledge on a narrow area that the expert isn't actively looking into.
I've had the same experience. But I will tell you that, unless you've worked in the industry, you can't fathom the amount of lunacy and horseshit that doctors must contend with under the guise of patients DYOR, and the dynamics in play don't allow them to just scroll past the idiot take. The priors you develop for the insightfulness of patient intel asymptotes to zero at great velocity.
Combine that with a time pressure to churn through patients so great that many of them can barely eat lunch, and perpetual fear of malpractice and lawsuits, and you get the current thing. It sucks for everyone.
reply
I would submit that, as someone who started out in climate science before moving into economics, that I can at least fathom the amount of lunacy and horseshit doctors encounter. The time constraint is a completely different dynamic, though.
To some degree, this is just a general feature of specialization. You're almost always going to know way more about what you do than whoever you're doing it for does.
When I'm teaching and a student brings something up that I don't know how to answer, I look into it and come back to them with an explanation. It's a disservice to treat people as dismissively as doctors (and professors) often do.
reply