Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it

I've been disappointed by this realization a couple of times. Finally, it dawned on me. Doctors aren't scientists. They're not supposed to be. They are technicians. They look in a service manual, pick a likely problem, and do the hotfix. If its not in the manual (or the part they have memorized), they're done.

Medical research and medical practice are two entirely different animals.

In fairness, that's generally the appropriate approach. Given the choice between "crackpot hypochondriac" and "disease most doctors won't see in a lifetime of practice", the former is far more common.

Though sometimes, in the bush, it was zebras.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, though. When I broke my collarbone last year, I joined a massive 'community' of patients with the most commonly broken bone in the human body. Initially I thought it'd be easy to get advice online with regard to what to expect in terms of healing time, mobility, pain, and long-term outcome, and what therapies were most/least effective. It wasn't. What I found made me realize that self-diagnosing pretty much anything on the Internet, no matter how trivial, is a really bad idea... and that this is true regardless of whether the doctors have better advice to offer.

Even if the consensus of doctors, nurses, authors, coaches, and fellow sufferers was that "Each case is different, so it's impossible to generalize about any of those things," that would've been fine. Unsatisfying, but fine. It would've been the correct conclusion for a new patient to reach. But it wasn't. If you look up clavicle fractures on the Web, you'll find a ridiculous array of claims, anecdotes, and received wisdom... and that's just in the peer-reviewed literature, never mind the various sports and health forums.

It turns out that nobody really knows the best way to treat collarbone fractures of a given type and severity. Ultimately you just go back for x-rays every couple of months (weeks) until the doctor tells you you can (remove the sling carefully) (get back on the bike) (pick fights with bears.) The nature and location of the fracture affects the prognosis, but doesn't have much to do with the treatment for those patients who don't opt for surgery. Some doctors swear by sling type X, others by brace type Y. Some doctors will yell at you to keep your sling on at all times; other doctors will tell you not to bother with it past the first three or four weeks unless you actually experience pain. Some doctors say not to lift anything at all; others say it's OK to lift until it hurts. The spectrum of advice given to patients who post essentially the same x-rays to various sports forums is amazing, as are the anecdotes ranging from "I blew off the doctor and went swimming in 4 weeks, no problem" to "I followed the doctor's advice and ended up in painful/painless surgery six months/two years later."

Again, none of this is unreasonable given the differences from one case to the next... but you won't recognize this fact based on advice found online. What most people will be tempted to do is surf until they get an answer they like, and then walk away from the browser thinking they know more than they did when they sat down.

As an exercise, I recommend that even HN readers with intact clavicles spend a couple of hours researching the condition from the POV of a newly diagnosed patient. You may not come away as disillusioned with the wisdom of the Internet as I did, but I believe you will think twice about the quality of online information if you're ever diagnosed with a serious, uncommon condition like Crohn's. Sorry, Crohn's (and collarbone) patients -- sometimes the truth just isn't out there.

Even with the extra information, the layperson may consider it more probable that the sun orbits the earth after the debate, which means that the general belief is less accurate afterwards.

[Yes, I'm aware that we live in a relativistic universe in which the sun is no more the center than the earth or any other point; but you get the idea.]

Yeah, I've thought of writing a blog post on this. The basic idea is that you give a voice to things that people already want to believe are true. This opens up a sort of window of credulity, which allows you to sell whatever you're trying to sell in the context of this unconscious angst that you're channeling. The best is if you can find some sort of belief that millions of people share but that no one has ever articulated or properly defended, that's how you make millions of dollars whether you're running a startup, writing a book, etc.

For some good writing on the subject have look at Douglas B. Lenat's essays about knowledge pumps and Cyc.

At least they were good about generating your own conclusions, and not just trying to make your observations fit with what the teacher thought they ought to be. Most of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Eyring

Yeah, I plucked a little too randomly perhaps - the point there is not that it is axiomatic (which I didn't claim) but that it is an arbitrary value; indeed it is a complex of arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat.

Why is it that value, well, er, just because (or some version of the anthropic principle if you swing that way).

Alternative logical axioms are something I find interesting but I've only really studied a couple of alternative axiomatic systems of arithmetic (Peano - limited as it is by Godel's incompleteness theorem, Robinson, ZFC, can't think of any others of the top of my head).

Can you expand on what you mean by this. Are you saying, for example, that you've proven GR without axioms - you've verified independently that a specific constant c is a necessary condition based on other axioms (or somesuch)? I take it you're a foundationalist?

An attempt at an example: The Bible says excessive greed is wrong. One can argue that it is a simple consequence of other more elementary moral statements within. Lets assume here that it's an axiomatic moral statement anyhow (I don't think it matters for these purposes). It works; it's independently verifiable that excessive greed is destructive. In Biblical terms such destructiveness is wrong (another axiom) whilst clearly wrong is not a scientifically determinable position.

I don't understand your "hint" it sounds like an attempt at snarky humour from a position of petitio principii but I really can't unravel the intention inside the gag.

But that's a high bar. Currently the bar is far below that, with many teachers obviously phoning it in to anyone paying attention. They can't be fired, and that's the problem I was talking about. I went to an excellent public school, and I was tiered with the 'smart kids', so I generally had relatively good teachers, and some that were absolutely excellent. Even there, though, some were blatantly awful, and should have clearly been fired. I took a couple of non-"Gifted and Talented" classes, and the teachers there were a good bit worse on average. Some seemingly knew less about their subject than some of their students, and taught things that were just false in some cases.

It's demoralizing to have terrible teachers. A few terrible teachers, and it makes kids restless and bored during the school day. Talent/quality density is important in many organizations, and schools are no exception.

The stakes are a good bit higher, though. It's cliched, but the kids in schools do form the base of the country's economy a few years down the road, and if a high percentage of them can't do much more than manual labor or service work because they weren't inspired and decided that learning sucked, the US is screwed in the long term. None of the benefits of a teacher's union are worth the risk they're creating. It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. As dkarl says, it works in other professions.

It would expose teachers to injustice and favoritism, sure. So what? Those are professional hazards we all face. It is teachers themselves who inform us that grades are always imperfect measurements of performance yet must be accepted because they play a constructive role in our system of education. It is in school that we learn how favoritism and personal animosity affect the official story of our performance. Those are important lessons because they prepare us to work in a world where judgment is necessary but perfect justice is never achieved. Don't you find it ironic that teachers refuse to submit to any unscientific and less-than-perfectly-just evaluation of their performance when they themselves teach children to accept such evaluations as an inevitable fact of modern life?