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I see you’re starting to understand how me and mine felt during/after the scamdemic overreaction.
Fucked if I know how you get the trust back. It’s gone. We’re just going to have to, as a society, deal with a permanently lower vaccination rate. I don’t have a solution, except to say that defenestrating the people pushing the medical… narratives, not just the Covid one but lots of other blatantly political stuff, would start a slow process of rebuilding trust. Not regaining, rebuilding. The uncritical trust in doctors is dead, and the medical establishment killed it.
I’ve been harping a lot recently on the need to build new, functional, things to replace the old ones going haywire in entirely predictable ways. I don’t really have a ‘solution’ solution in the case of the medical establishment but I’m pretty sure the medical price transparency crowd will be the ones best positioned to come up with one.
Nope. This is a culture sort of thing that pretty much cannot be fixed by any sort of discrete and minimal use of political power which can plausibly be granted to humans. A major reason for this is the speech/opinion vs. conduct divide.
Fundamentally, medical price transparency can be viewed as a discrete regulation on conduct. Thou shalt simply give thy patient a couple numbers that thou unquestionably has (even if thou wants to play dumb/lie and pretend that thou art incapable of even identifying the names of the numbers in question). We can easily check if you're giving your patients the numbers or not. It can be mostly checked by people who know almost nothing about medicine, using a simple bureaucratic process, which has proven itself capable in many other domains.
We don't have to care whatsoever about your opinion-based speech. In fact, if you want to be really bold, you can even persist in telling your patient that you don't have the numbers in question, so long as you still actually hand those numbers over. (I have to imagine that, in practice, even doctors would manage to conjure up some feeling of shame in going that far in telling such obvious, in your face, observable lies.) No penalty whatsoever for even the most boldly false speech, so long as you just do the simple thing of handing them a piece of paper with a couple numbers on it.
Whereas the production/dissemination of knowledge is inherently riddled with opinion/speech, through and through. In my nonpolitical field, it is my personal opinion that there are tons of papers that are just garbage... some of which I believe are simply wrong or not true. But that's just, like, my opinion, maaaaaan. I'm sure that popularizers of science outputs ("science journalists") have varying opinions on what makes for good popular science... and of course, I have my own opinions on which such institutional outlets I think have reasonable such opinions vs. those which I think have gone off the rails. But again, those are just my opinions. I may be wrong! I may be wrong within my own field! It is entirely possible (though I think unlikely, at least in the extremely narrow domains in which I hold the strongest opinions) that future developments will demonstrate that some of my opinions are, indeed, flatly wrong! I know that I have been wrong in the past (thankfully, most of the examples I can think of were very long ago while I was still a learning student, including one where a mistake was found in the review process that I was thankfully able to fix before publication). I've pointed out to colleagues where they've been wrong in some of their prior publications (and thankfully managed to convince them and maintain incredibly good working relations with them).
How could we possibly impose some external, bureaucratically-enforceable rules on that world? Yes yes, we might be able to slice off one tiny little fraction where we have indisputable proof that someone engaged in willful, knowing fraud. But I think the standard of proof needs to be pretty darn high in order to avoid catching a bunch of people who are just "innocently" wrong.
All of that is, unless, of course, you somehow want a Ministry of Truth to determine when anyone is merely wrong. But I have a feeling that such a Ministry would make haste to torch its own credibility even more rapidly than many folks are currently doing so.
[Culled a bunch of rambling about the side-hobby of trying to come up with various ideas that could help and all the problems with them. Maybe I'll post on that another time, but it's probably just distracting here.]
If you probably don't want a Ministry of Truth and basically none of the ideas for little tweaks can really cut through the inherent subjectivity in the process, it's probably simply subject to culture and commons-problems. We probably don't have much of a solution besides just watching which cultures are more prone to commons-burning. Given that the medical industry is willing to torch its credibility on simple, objective shit like numbers on pieces of paper, I'm pretty doubtful that its culture has the soul/spirit to carefully tend to its knowledge-production garden. There really is something to the virtue ethics point of view that lies and being accustomed to lying really does damage the heart/vigor to pursue the truth elsewhere in the face of likely personal consequences.
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