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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

You should read til the end! No cabal, just stupidity and believing other people are stupid instead of telling them the truth and expecting them to act smart based on the information.

Ask yourself, do you think billionnaires have yearly MRIs or that they wait for later because the doctor and themselves will be anxious? It's an argument that treats regular people as stupid.

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First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability.

If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable.

Also, it’s quite likely that billionaires are having lots of unnecessary procedures and that harm is being caused. The mri scans are not the reason they live longer!

Ok but now the argument shifted from "More MRI = bad" to "More MRI = okay as long as doctors do a good job and have enough time". I agree with that. My point was just that it's possible to get to a point where everyone having yearly MRIs is doable because the issue isn't with more information in itself, it's with doctors not having enough time for the patient.

But now your argument also depends on no opportunity costs for doing unneeded mri, or infinite medical resources.

As I said … we really don’t known how much harm billionaires are suffering (sob) and there are much simpler explanations for their longevity.

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