[ExI] internet as the biggest advance in medicine ever

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

2010/7/12 Gregory Jones <spike66 at att.net>

>
> So how do we create the data matrix and make some effort to keep out most of the charlatans?  Is it possible?  Ideas?  Register the matrix users and have them monitored by the medics?
>

### What you ask is not really a medical question but a fundamental
problem in epistemology - who do we trust?

You might want to ask yourself who do you trust, under what
circumstances, and is your trust justified? Presumably, you trust your
grocer not to sell you tainted veggies, to the point of actually
eating them without first cooking them to death. Some persons might
trust Mr Obama to want to act in their best interest. Some of common
formst of trust are justified, others (due to diverse human emotional
and cognitive deficiencies) are not. There appear to be methods of
social construction and individual cognition that reliably produce
justifiable trusting relationships between parties, and there are
biases that result in unjustified trust. And then there are of course
individual differences between people and societies in terms of their
ability to use the effective methods and embody effective
constructions for trust-building. This of course leads to differential
outcomes between individuals and societies, outcomes related to both
insufficient and misplaced trust.

So, "Who should we trust?" is a big question, and there are big
obstacles to answering it. A clue where to look for answers should
come from realizing that all trust is a network effect, the result of
interactions of independent, non-equal nodes in varying topologies of
information exchange. One versed in the science of computer networks
may have here an advantage over naive observers, at least in terms of
being able to identify from first principles the network topologies
and protocols likely to work better than others.

Once such technical issues are resolved, other participants might need
to tackle the normative issues, such as "Is it acceptable to have some
stupid losers waste money and lives when they buy snake oil, if this
is the price for allowing the rest of us the best chance for learning
about and obtaining the best medicine possible?", or maybe "We should
enable a huge bureaucracy to give us the feeling that we are
protecting the defenseless [inser victim group here] from ruthless
exploitation, even if it means slowing medical progress and hurting us
all in the long term".

But my prediction is that, should we try to discuss the technical
details of justifiable trust-building in networks as applied to
medicine, we would end with the same discussion we had here before
many times.

Rafal

PS. Of course I am for abolishing all drug prescription laws, medical
licensure and the FDA, since these do not meet the technical criteria
that trustworthy institutions have to meet.