[extropy-chat] Failure of low-fat diet

[Russell Wallace]

On 2/23/06, Robin Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:
>
> At 12:01 PM 2/23/2006, you wrote:
> >It shows graphs of the mortality rates as a function of time.  There
> >isn't much apparent effect at the time when famous vaccines were
> introduced.
> >
> >But you didn't answer my question. What do you think stopped people
> >dying of those diseases, if it wasn't the vaccines?
>
> There are lots of logical possibilities, and my state of belief is
> that I am very uncertain about which one it might be.   You said
> before that you couldn't believe the evidence I pointed you to,
> because you had a mountain of contrary evidence, but at this point it
> looks like you just have a presumption and lack of imagination.
>

The paper you pointed me to showed some weak evidence that the last third of
health care spending is useless. Not strong enough to be taken seriously, in
fact, except that health care spending is a strongly 90/10 affair (the cost
of medicine is usually in strong _inverse_ proportion to its effectiveness),
so the claim is a priori plausible.

For the claim that the entire enterprise of health, hygiene and sanitation
for the last couple of centuries has been useless, it provided not even weak
evidence, merely some vague handwaving. Handwaving for a claim whose truth
would require existential conspiracy well beyond "the moon landings were a
hoax" and approaching "God created the world in 4004 BC complete with fake
fossils" territory.

No, I can't mathematically prove the last 200 years of history aren't a
fake, or that longer lifespans aren't really the result of psychic
emanations from Zeta Reticuli carefully timed to correspond to distribution
of vaccines, antibiotics etc (presumably all the labs that demonstrated
these things working in controlled experiments would have to be particularly
carefully controlled, or else all in on the conspiracy). Yes, like all
skeptics I'm unsurprised to be accused of presumption and lack of
imagination - though most people who do that at least have a proposal of
their own to put forward, even one that involves a word salad of "energy"
and "vibrations". But at the end of the day rationality requires having a
mind that is open... but not so open that everything falls out.

- Russell
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