121–130 of 153 posts
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Yes, there is a price to pay for being a public servant.
You realize they're not actually servants, right? "Take a job with the Fed, sign up for a lifetime of lower income so that HN can nod sagely about avoiding the appearance of impropriety" is a recipe to get no one to ever work for the government.
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You dont need that falsified data to come to the conclusion vaccinations in the US are a problem. Remove it from the picture. Compare the US vaccination schedule to any other develop country. Compare our infant mortality rate. Aside from the differences in the vaccination schedules what is the US doing different from other developed nations. Keeping in mind infants do little but eat food, sleep and see a doctor. So i…
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Anti-vax stuff aside, the attitude of >Trust experts or die. is not a scientific attitude, it is borderline scientism and an appeal to authority. Remember when the tobacco industry paid medical experts such as ENT Doctors to endorse smoking? [0] The idea that "the rubes" don't have to or shouldn't be allowed to see the data behind FDA decisions and should just trust the experts blindly is completely condescending and…
>is not a scientific attitude True, but asking non-scientists to have a scientists attitude is ridiculous. This "everyone is a scientist" idea creates the "everyone is a skeptic" situation, except, when a rube is a skeptic, they're not intellectually skeptical, they're using "skeptic" to mean "bias confirmation". If you're not a scientist (PhD and publishing) then you don't need a "scientific" attitude. For the other…
When considering a medication that is being sold to me such as an anti-depressant with possible long-term harmful side effects, I absolutely want to be familiar with the clinical efficacy and peer reviewed literature on that medication to assess the risks of whether it's worth it for myself.
What about opioids? There were some studies conducted by experts and promoted by the Sacklers that said that opioids were not addictive. Surely I don't have a right to be skeptical of those claims because the surveys were conducted by experts, right? I'm not a post-doc researcher, so obviously I can't tell you that OxyContin is habit-forming.
You're basically arguing for blind trust on the part of the patient, which is very disempowering.
It's very understandable when you present unquestioning obedience and credentialism worship as the only alternative to taking active steps towards being empowered, why people would tell the "experts" to fuck off and trust their own common sense instead as Taleb describes [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
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> The efficacy of a particular molecule for a particular patient isn't much easier than that to determine. How do you handle situations where the provider doesn’t know/care which is best either and just chooses the intervention that was the most heavily marketed to them? Why do we see new patent drugs replace the “old and boring” generics without any proven efficacy benefit?
You make public health care with fixed prices to contain the capitalism incentive. Worked for us in france: hospitals get pressure from the state and must justify their refundable expenses. It's not perfect, there are still abuses, but it's nowhere the circus we see in the US.
Frankly, Me and most of America think the FDA approves things according to the highest bidder. This is one of the biggest contributing factors to the anti vax movement. | The trust in our govt and all govt agencies is simply gone.
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You dont need that falsified data to come to the conclusion vaccinations in the US are a problem. Remove it from the picture. Compare the US vaccination schedule to any other develop country. Compare our infant mortality rate. Aside from the differences in the vaccination schedules what is the US doing different from other developed nations. Keeping in mind infants do little but eat food, sleep and see a doctor. So i…
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E.g., there are some reports on how much data was needed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to conclude that the Higgs Boson DOES exist -- the amount of data needed was beyond belief. Sooooo, anytime well short of that much data they could have conluded that the Higgs did not exist, that is, so far their data failed to show that it DID exist. Same for any treatment: If don't collect enough data, use poor measures, let the data get corrupted, etc., i.e., do sloppy work, then will fail to find where the treatment did work and conclude that it didn't.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we had to ask you the exact same thing recently. Please don't do this on HN—regardless of how strongly you feel on the topic, it leads to flamewar and the flamewars are all the same.
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Thank you for this. So often we rip on government agencies from our perch on...Hacker News, when we really have no idea what's going on. We do work with the Government in a different context, and I've found nothing but professionalism and deep expertise. In fact the people I've met in the agencies we're working with are some of the smartest I've encountered in my entire career.
>often we rip on government agencies from our perch on...Hacker News, when we really have no idea what's going on. In a single department, we don't know. As a whole, it's been shown over and over that like any organization, government becomes corrupt. Between defense and universities, I've heard depressing ancedotes as well. It's lucky and temporary you had a good experience.