RFK - Make America Healthy? again?

I always enjoy that the consensus of nearly every medically educated professional on the planet backed by literally mountains of data is "a con" but things posted by a nameless account on Twitter with absolutely nothing supporting it is instantly gospel truth.

What a world to live in.

I tell every vaccine and science skeptic I know the same thing - next time you go to ER and the doctor tells you what medical care you need tell him no, that you want him to follow what you read on Facebook instead.

There is no point in the Democrats fighting this. In fact, they should be enabling it. GOPers dying because they are not vaccinated means that they cannot vote. No reason for the Dems to stand in the way of the GOP literally cutting their own throats. Cut away, idiots,. Cut away.

not sure why you think skepticism about some portion of "science" must necessarily translate into skepticism of all science, even within the same discipline.

For example i am not skeptic of vaccines (in the sense that i believe the consensus has been formed in good faith about them and that the claims being communicated are mostly true, about safety and efficacy) while i am extremely skeptic about nutritionism.

And yes i would disregard nutrition counsel by physicians or other "experts", especially if they are less fit and in worse health than i am.

That doesn't mean i will have any problems with the ER fixing a broken bone because that's a portion of medicine which i trust a lot (at least in my city), as football players nationwide come here to get fixed, and that's proof enough for me they are good at it.

See how it works? skepticism doesn't equal a brain dead rejection of entire disciplines.

And btw some people can be better than the purported "consensus" (Which often doesn't exist on specific topics) , or than the specific individual you have the disgrace to interact with in the healthcare sector (not everyone is good at their jobs you know?), and some of them could decide to communica with social media.

That doesn't make their positions "less reasonable" or less worthy of trust inherently.

If we assume a vaccine works, its effectiveness on public health depends pretty much only two things: Trust and availability.

Measles is a bit of an extreme case due to sheer infectiousness of the disease, but we see already from in drops of vaccine coverage from 95+ to about 90ish that you start to get outbreaks, hospitalizations and deaths. Completely unnecessarily as well, this disease was as good as eliminated from developed countries before this anti-vaxx nonsense started festering.

There is also people who can't take certain vaccines due to health conditions, and a drop in coverage puts them at greater risk as well.

Rachel Levine spent a lot of time fighting vaccine hesitancy among LGBTQ people, especially minority ones, according to her that's a demographic that's far more vaccine hesitant than the general population.

But i know you sleep well by believing vaccine hesitancy is just a republican phenomenon

If it wasn't for the children and immuno-compromised I would fully agree with this. As it stands, though, I can't.

He was talking covid vaccine which does nothing for the spread

Being a "skeptic" for an area of medicine that someone has no training or full knowledge about makes them a skeptic of all science because they have no informed basis to decide what areas to be skeptical about. It would be like walking onto a plane and doubting the pilot is skilled enough to get you to New York but having full confidence he can get you to Massachusetts.

Unless you are decent at statistics which would make you already exceptionally better than the median physician at reading medical papers, and assessing the validity of the causal claims.

The difference between "treating a single patient from diagnosis to everything that follows it" and "having a proper understanding of the actual causal claims of scientific literature" is the same as that of a pilot driving a plane and trusting a pilot about what's the optimal pricing strategy for air travel companies.

There is basically no overlap at all.

Physicians are truly horrible beyond belief at basic statistics as reported countless of time, in, unironically, literature itself. They suck horrendously at basic concepts. They have no ****ing clue in most cases.

That means they mostly can't understand , epistemologically, literature. They can only read the conclusions at the end of a paper (or rather the summaries of many of them) and hope they are correct. And they also have far less time than i do to study a specific niche topic in depth unless they are specifically specifalized on that.

Yes i can easily become incredibly more informed about vaccine efficacy and safety (or literally anything else in medical literature) than every physician who doesn't work as a vaccine researcher basically. I am far better than the vast majority of them at reading the literature and i have far more spare time than basically every singly one of them to spend on that.

I can spend 100 hours in a month reading that, 99.95% of them never spent 100 hours of their whole lives reading papers about vaccine efficacy and safety ok? unless that's exactly their job.

That applies to everything because statistics underpin the totality of knowledge in some sense, so being good at statistics and spending time on a topic makes you better than most professionals at their own job, *at assessing scientifical claims validity*, even within their own disciplines.

That's not the same as "doing their job" because their job isn't assessing scientifical claims in their own discipline, as explained. Most of the times they do a lot of completly different things from what we are talking about, for their whole career.

The fully ******ed pilot metaphor is born by this completly mistaken idea that being a professional in discipline X means you are an expert on the scientifical claims of the whole discipline.

Think of someone telling you "well this guy won a lot at poker so he necessarily is very good at understanding the mathematical notions behind variance in poker".

Lol wtf? who would you trust more to assess risk of ruin in a poker game, a poker player who won a lot in his career, or someone decent at statistics who has access to a lot of data from that game?

It's like saying that an accountant is an expert on the economics of taxation. Or that a criminal lawyer is an expert on the history of jurisprudential philosophical thought. The only connection is "the topic is vaguely connected" but they have no ****ing clue most of the times about the big picture.

No, I wasn’t.

You have repeatedly demonstrated that you know very, very little.

This comes from the same mind that was unaware US public school children can bring food to school and eat it.

Not only they are terrible at statistics, they don't know they are terrible at it and they think they are good

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Healthcare professionals’ statistical illiteracy can impair medical decision quality and compromise patient safety. Previous studies have documented clinicians’ insufficient proficiency in statistics and a tendency in overconfidence. However, an underexplored aspect is clinicians’ awareness of their lack of statistical knowledge that precludes any corrective intervention attempt. Here, we investigated physicians’, residents’ and medical students’ alignment between subjective confidence judgments and objective accuracy in basic medical statistics. We also examined how gender, profile of experience and practice of research activity affect this alignment, and the influence of problem framing (conditional probabilities, CP vs. natural frequencies, NF). Eight hundred ninety-eight clinicians completed an online survey assessing skill and confidence on three topics: vaccine efficacy, p value and diagnostic test results interpretation. Results evidenced an overall consistent poor proficiency in statistics often combined with high confidence, even in incorrect answers. We also demonstrate that despite overconfidence bias, clinicians show a degree of metacognitive sensitivity, as their confidence judgments discriminate between their correct and incorrect answers. Finally, we confirm the positive impact of the more intuitive NF framing on accuracy. Together, our results pave the way for the development of teaching recommendations and pedagogical interventions such as promoting metacognition on basic knowledge and statistical reasoning as well as the use of NF to tackle statistical illiteracy in the medical context.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PM...

Look at the first answer

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The same, tired "experts make mistakes so I'm just as qualified" response. Next time you're on a plane and the pilot announces they're off course you should stand up and announce to everyone you're going to take over and fly everyone home because he obviously doesn't know what he's doing.

I'm not dead AND NOT VACCINATED. How do you explain that genius? None of the other unvaccinated people I know are dead either.

Speaking of statistics here's an interesting recent study.

https://www.longdom.org/open-access/the-...

At least you're admitting your sphere of knowledge is self-limited to what you personally see and observe. That's commendable.

I don't doubt the efficacy of the vaccin.
I wonder however why you chose to get the vaccin while simultaneously rambling about empty hospitals and covid hoax?

I'm quite open to data and statistics that prove or disprove what I observe personally. It's called having an open mind.

Not getting the covid vax was an easy decision. I only had to satisfy one question for myself. Was there any long term safety data?

Because I trust non political/center right (culturally before than politically) scientists especially from east Asia.

In particular the Japanese.

I don't "ramble", and we acknowledged hospitals were objectively emptier than average year -wide during COVID .

Not sure what you mean with "COVID hoax".

You asked what difference it would have made to have knowledge that the origins of sarscov2 were from a lab instead of a bat.

I listed objective facts including the fact that because we trusted the Chinese , we annihilated worldwide consensus scientific knowledge and attempted something never before was attempted.

You didn't answer

you asked me to point out non UK source when you are the one equating that UK policy .
I'm not a covid expert, like you btw.

I do like however randomly pollute your day with random questions.

You know what, that's fine. I don't have any issue with this at all. But stop pulling up bs "studies" to try to justify your decision to everyone else. It's almost like you think you were wrong somehow and you make up a bunch of crap to prove to yourself that you weren't.

I honestly don't think anyone here cares that you made a personal decision for the reason you state.

No pocket, it's "experts at x aren't experts at meta-x".

You guys pushed as "expert opinion" the opinion of people who weren't actually experts about how to gauge scientifical claims all the times and you keep doing it right now

And again with the pilot. Which has nothing to do with the topic.

Because piloting is a physical, analogical skill, while assessing data and causality is a purely digital skill, and it is perfectly portable across domains.

I am better than the vast majority of professionals who don't spend their full-time job assessing causality and data sets, even at analyzing data and causal claims about their discipline, because I do that (much) more often than they do and my IQ is higher than most of them anyway.

And btw it's not like I am alone, I assess my evaluations with the *actual* experts when available.

And consensus is far far far rarer than you guys want to claim anyway on most controversial topics.

Vaccines are a special case because there actually is a consensus.

But not on mandates note well, everyone who claims there is a clear scientific consensus about mandates being preferable would be lying (for all vaccines).

I suggest asking your friends and neighbors and go with that.