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pedanterrific comments on Mike Darwin on Steve Jobs's hypocritical stance towards death - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
Relevant. (Summary: Jobs' type of cancer is relatively treatable when caught early, which it was. Unfortunately, he delayed 'conventional' treatment for nine months in favor of an 'alternative' diet.)
Not sure what moral to take from this. Fear of mortality makes people do crazy things, perhaps?
When people ask, "What's the harm in believing in Astrology/Homeopathy/Alternative Medicine/etc" or "What good is rationality", remember this as an example. Steve Jobs died because he did not make rational choices and because he trusted in sham science.
It's easy for people to brush off numbers from some websites by saying they're inaccurate. But a single example can stick in their minds. I hope that his death can serve to ward others away from such dangerous practices. I hope that the next time someone thinks about abandoning rational decisionmaking, especially in the health field, they remember this lesson paid for in blood: One of the richest and most beloved CEOs in the world died because of alternative medicine. The same thing can easily happen to you if you do the same.
I hope his memory can still contribute to the world by sparing others of the same fate.
Are you sure this is right? Hasn't Robin Hanson taught us that we can't always trust the medical profession's claims about how useful the medical profession is.
One thing that's much more trustworthy than average is the claim: "Early detected disease X? We can totally fix that!" It's a falsifiable claim.
Claims that are deeply tied to statistics, statistical significance, fuzzy definitions, subtle effects, or other things are more likely to be the wrong ones.
Brightness in one area does not imply bright action in another.
The importance of IQ, a single measure of intelligence, contradicts your statement.
Intelligence in one area is evidence of intelligence in another, but not infinite evidence. Problem dissolved.
You are defining imply such that X implies Y means that if X happens Y always occurs, whereas I'm defining imply to mean that if X happens Y is more likely to occur than if X didn't happen. In this context my interpretation is better since yours renders MartinB's statement trivially true and therefore vacuous.
Edit: I misinterpreted Oscar's comment.
That's exactly what I intended to mean (my comment wasn't intended to support MartinB over you).
I don't think I actually understand your comment correctly. Could you elaborate? There are many intelligent people who do great work in one area while failing in another. A successful entrepreneur who is into alternative medicine is not particularly surprising.
IQ, a single number, is important because people who are smart in one area tend on average to be smart in others. Jobs was extremely good at making decisions based on an intelligent analysis of complex information so I would expect him to be at least above average at making personal medical decisions.
Jobs has been described as
We should be shocked if he did an incompetent job of choosing his own cancer treatment.
Are you assuming a linear relation between IQ and correct decision making? In medical issues a person of normal IQ could just go with whatever the doctor says, while a high IQ person might know enough to know about all the troubles with medical services, yet be not able to distinguish a case where the doctors way is the absolutely best option there is.
The article claims he choose wrongly, and we should be sad about that. But not necessarily surprised.
What would that assumption even mean?