Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

"Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?"

Because, for once, they aren't being mindless sheeple? Presented with something that can be proven or disproven, they actually want that to happen, unlike other subjects which don't have any hard lines that can be drawn, and they simply follow.

The essence of the scientific method is to trust nothing that hasn't been proven, with evidence, and peer reviewed. Then scientists go to the public and expect people to take their word for it. They really can't see why that doesn't work?

People are going to trust their experiences and pre-conceptions before the word of a stranger, no matter how many letters are after his name. If that stranger happens to line up with their existing knowledge, they believe him without question ONLY because their existing knowledge says the same thing. They don't believe the scientist, they believe in themselves.

That's how most people work, anyhow. There's a few who go beyond that and challenge even things they have always believed to be true.

It's great to be suspicious of results in a field in which you're an expert, but physicists and biochemists hardly ask their doctor for peer-reviewed proof that his advice is correct. At any rate, people who are so inclined can look up actual research done; but most people won't have the expertise to understand it anyway, which is completely normal outside of your own field.

To constantly question everything, or to go with one's preconceived notions irrespective of how much evidence there is against them, is both dangerous and stupid - professional scientists might be wrong about some things, but if the vast majority of them agree on something that you're not qualified to discuss, you can and should assume that they're probably right. A good litmus test for this is asking what evidence you would need to be convinced that you're wrong; if you don't know or if the answer is there is no evidence, you don't know what you're talking about.

Maybe they should ask their doctor, given the recent spate of articles on ineffectiveness of medical treatment:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-hea... (If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it.)

But of course, doctors are not scientists.

"If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it."

I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055

Interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

The study also indicated a small percentage of treatments evidenced as actually harmful, so that in the end only a third of the treatments were efficacious.

My own experience in a clinical setting showed that most doctors (say, outside a university health system) have trouble keeping up with the research in their field.

"My own experience in a clinical setting showed that most doctors (say, outside a university health system) have trouble keeping up with the research in their field."

There is a study somewhere about what percentages of doctors can name at least one finding from their medical field within the last year, and it was some abysmally low figure. Do you happen to know what I'm referencing? I am looking for the cite for something, but can't find it unfortunately.

>"If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness"

"What percentage of the around 3000 treatments included in Clinical Evidence fall into each category:

- 11% Beneficial

- 23% Likely to be beneficial

- 7% Trade off between benefits and harm

- 51% Unknown effectiveness

- 5% Unlikely to be beneficial

- 3% Likely to be ineffective or harmful

http://clinicalevidence.bmj.com/ceweb/about/knowledge.jsp

It seems rather optimistic to think that climate change can be (dis-)proven without going beyond the knowledge of the average person. And even where an average person could learn enough to check the data (e.g. in the whole autism-vaccines mess), people rarely do so.

Many have become skeptics after personally checking the data and protocol.

Often this is not provided in enough detail to replicate the study. All such studies should be discarded.

Those that provide their data and exact protocol can be reviewed.

Journal articles are not an assertion of truth. They are an alleged reporting of results, which should be provided in enough detail to get the same results. This is necessary because historically only a minority of peer reviewed journal published results have reported things that ended up being true.

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