[extropy-chat] Failure of low-fat diet

[Robin Hanson]

At 12:31 PM 2/23/2006, Russell Wallace 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 ...

My paper cited a bunch of papers, not just one.   I have taught 
health economics for seven years now, and my course syllabus (on the 
web) gives more cites.   And I have studied even more papers over the 
years. Since you say there is a mountain of evidence on the other 
side, how about you cite something you consider to be strong evidence?




Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323