Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

Doctors' hands on experience gives them a special kind of knowledge pretty close to scientific. Also, science doesn't really proves, but rather disproves, and the "softer" the science, the harder it is to get any certainties... (And medicine, unlike biology, is a soft science.)

View on HN

it's not that doctors don't have specialized knowledge that might be stochastically predictive in specific cases, but that their experience, especially around something like a pandemic, skews their perspecive in ways that are very difficult to self-identify and compensate for. and that's on top of doctors holding their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views too.

in other words, expertise is narrow, and treatment experience isn't research.

Everyone has their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views. I would not discount doctors' specialized knowledge as 'not science' (or worse, 'not evidence'). You just have to remember that medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).

that's intuition, not science. that doesn't mean it's not useful, it's just not useful as science. the point of the appeal to authority fallacy is to identify and unbias us against that kind of rhetorical trap in argumentation.

I don't understand this. If I spend my life designing bridges I still have to prove it with math. What kind of medicine is not science but "hands on"?

Bridges are a good example. You have to remember that bridge building (as pretty much any field of engineering or even science) didn't start out as math-first, but as experience-first. And there's really no opposition there, after all whole fields of science (the 'soft' sciences) don't (can't) even use math ! Medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com