[extropy-chat] Are vaccinations useless? (meta)

[Lee Corbin]

Samantha writes

> Keith Henson wrote:
> > [Samantha wrote]
> > > Okay.  I am done with this pointless discussion.
> >
> > I would like to go Meta on Samantha here.  This is a
> > reasonable discussion of a puzzle that is based on real
> > numbers and the numbers lead to discounting a lot of
> > what we thought was obvious--that medicine as
> > practiced by doctors had a lot of influence on
> > longer lives.

I agree with Keith to the extent that I find it very curious
the way a number of posters have exercised so little caution
in attacking Hal's conclusions. Indeed, Hal can hardly be
blamed for wondering just what other effects are in play here.
(I want to say that I'm excluding Rafal's well-written counter-
points.)

Samantha then sums up the situation nicely:

> The discussion has gone from being about which factors have how much  
> effect on longevity, with more or less reasonableness, to being about  
> medicine in several specifics or generally not being worth bothering  
> with (including the idea of not going to doctors), to being at a meta  
> level of how people supposedly deal with or don't deal with things  
> that upset their prior beliefs... It has cycled among these things
> repeatedly and often unexpectedly when various participant[s] attempt
> to pin one or another aspect down.

Nothing wrong with us doing that either. Discussing this meta-topic is
*so* much more effective with a real case at hand.

Lee