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

[Samantha Atkins]

On Mar 15, 2006, at 1:34 PM, Keith Henson wrote:

> At 01:19 PM 3/14/2006 -0800, Samantha wrote:
>
>> On Mar 14, 2006, at 12:54 PM, Hal Finney wrote:
>>
>>> The excerpt I posted from the "Economics of Health Care" textbook
>>> yesterday was intended to confirm the point that the consensus in  
>>> the
>>> field is that medical practice played a small or even insignificant
>>> role.
>>
>> Role in what precisely?
>
> Lenghting average lilfe span.
>
>> If it advocates some of what I've seen here it isn't worth my time.
>>
>>> The two excerpts I posted yesterday both offered reasons why
>>> vaccination
>>> and antibiotics are thought to have been of relatively little  
>>> benefit.
>>
>> 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.
>

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.  Toss in a smattering of hypotheses  
that don't seem as good as ones currently accepted.  It has cycled  
among these things repeatedly and often unexpectedly when various  
participant attempt to pin one or another aspect down.  I am out of  
energy and time for what seems to me to be a rather pointless  
intellectual game.

- samantha