tim comments on Miracle Mineral Supplement - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 November 2012 09:17PM

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Comment author: tim 21 November 2012 06:52:58AM *  3 points [-]

I think this is a rather uncharitable interpretation of my argument. There is a difference between how strong an effect is and how common it is. If you had said "Another angle on this is that it isn't about humans in general, it's about [a small subset of humans that happened to experience an unfortunate convergence of misinformation and subjective context]" then we would have no disagreement.

I'm not contending that these situations are representative of the human population, but rather that these situations do not require "some of the most gullible humans" to occur.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 November 2012 02:38:44PM 0 points [-]

You could be right.

The thing both of us are leaving out is that deciding what can be trusted is a genuinely hard problem. You can get badly hurt trusting conventional medical advice, too.