Quote:
Originally Posted by SifuPhil  A car should operate in a certain manner, just as a human being should. Just like cars, humans display a bewildering tendency to break the mold and act in ways that seem to fly in the face of our reasoned knowledge. I've owned cars that only started when you banged the glove-box door. There was no scientific reason at all that this should have occured, but it did. |
Well, with the significant caveat that there's much more differentiation among humans than there is among cars. Steve says: "How do we know the average trend will hold true for a male, blond-haired, blue-eyed, colorblind, non-smoking, left-handed, vegan, married father-of-two living in Las Vegas?" My reaction to that is to ask "And how do we know that what holds true for one male, blond-haired, blue-eyed, colorblind, non-smoking, left-handed, vegan, married father-of-two living in Las Vegas will hold true for another male, blond-haired, blue-eyed, colorblind, non-smoking, left-handed, vegan, married father-of-two living in Las Vegas?" (There's a whole branch of epidemiology that studies twins to see how similar and different they are.)
We
are all individuals, which is why trustworthy doctors will put their statistics in terms of trends or tendencies, or at least provide confidence intervals for their statistics. (We also use clustering when we can - which is the principle that person A and person B have different influences in their lives, and thus will have different reactions to the stimuli.) We the data-analysts know full well that what works for person A isn't going to work for person B, but given a large enough sample size we can make predictions about what will tend to happen to the general populace.
Also, you say there was no
scientific reason that the car wouldn't start unless you banged the glove-box door, but I think it's more accurate to say that you couldn't
find a scientific reason why that should be so. (I can think of one off the top of my head - a short in the wiring leading to the glove-box light might be interfering with the starter mechanism. I had a car once with a trailer hitch that an enterprising electrician had managed to wire in serial - so when the (unused) trailer-hitch wiring developed a short, the whole lighting system disappeared, up to and including the dashboard lights...)
Quote:
Originally Posted by SifuPhil Likewise, doctors (of both species - Traditionalus and Holisticus) are faced with a diagnostic logic-tree of staggering proportions. Just like that auto mechanic, they pick the most likely cause and treat for that, then sit back, play a round of golf  , and see what happens. |
I'm well aware of that. (In fact, like I said, I'm involved in a study of what happens when medical professionals
do get the diagnosis wrong.) The problem is that saying "doctors sometimes get it wrong, so we shouldn't trust what doctors say" is like saying "well, I didn't have any money come into my life today despite having the Million-Dollar intention, so the Million Dollar Experiment and intention-manifestation must be a bust". Neither is a really appropriate way to approach the world. The trick is - again, as I said - to figure out what you can trust, and trust that - and take everything else with a grain of salt.
(Wait, is salt bad for you this year?)