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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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The issue here is that the government had abdicated the role of deciding what counts as "medically necessary treatment" to doctors. This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now we have reams and reams of court precident citing professional standards generated by private doctor's associations as evidence of medical nessesity, such that it now overrules state laws attempting to regulate medical care.

I think that probably is a good idea going forwards, in the sense that the legislatures are probably not the right body to be making that determination.

It is sad that the professional bodies are beholden to nonsense, but at least they have the capacity to know what they are talking about and make the evidence-based call.

Ultimately, it seems like a choice between those that don't know and those that know better.

make the evidence-based call.

It isn't always evidence that is the deciding factor. To point to another hot-button issue, I don't trust doctors to decide "when is abortion murder?", because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

because it is more a question of moral philosophy than medicine.

This conflation of "expertise in a given field" and "ability to make complex moral judgements", already far too common in PMC spaces, became turbocharged during Covid. It's baffling the number of people who seem to think that simply being extremely knowledgeable about epidemiology automatically makes you qualified to judge which civil liberties can be indefinitely suspended.

(It's easy to expose how facile this reasoning is: no one thinks extensive training in firearms automatically makes you qualified to make a moral judgement on how easy it should be to buy a gun.)

Complicating that is that Covid revealed a lot of those "experts" weren't extremely knowledgable about epidemiology either -- e.g. the charts coming from the Canadian CDC showing predicted rapid exponential growth in deaths in the short term, which kept not happening. Either these people were lying, or they were failures even in their own field.

Absolutely. I don't believe that even one of Neil Ferguson's enormously pessimistic projections came to pass, but for some reason he's still held up as some kind of guru.

Agreed, that's quite a different thing though.

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