It's rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn't an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.

It's practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you've defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I can tell based solely upon your (unconvincing) arguments that 1. drug companies have broadly tested and dismissed traditional medicines and 2. that alternative medicines don't work in general. If this isn't what you meant, please elaborate.

My point about questioning your ontology was in pointing out that you seem to define "alternative treatments" as ineffective without using any data to back up your claims. If you define alternative treatments as ineffective without there being a meaningful ontological distinction unifying them, you're not making any argument at all but only arguing a tautology. I would argue that this false distinction is rooted in corporate marketing practices intended to guise economic bias behind a word-veil (not that you are doing it on purpose), just like the two American political parties try to define themselves as the correct choice despite there being little identifiable ontological difference between them.

Id est, corporations define things they like as medicine and other things as "alternative treatments", but the distinction between them is based upon concepts of economic ownership and maneuvering of the market instead of useful empirical evidence.

Excuse me, I didn't mean to say that this A-B-C argument was your argument. (I've corrected the single word in the original post which made it sound like that). I was making a statement about the only argument against alternative treatments which was developed enough to identify in this thread.

In regards to what you were arguing, I answered above by requesting some real data for your broad claims about pharmaceutical companies doing extensive research on traditional remedies.

You are right. It isn't as obvious as I thought. The rough thought process was that we know that very rarely people on occasion do due the first two in response to diseases and terrible tragedies. But I wasn't thinking about the issue that I don't have a good estimate for what fraction of strokes and similar events are caused by unlikely quantum events. Without a better idea of how those numbers stand and a comparison for how much quantum dice rolling would be required for Jobs to have decided to become a monk I can't tell. I do suspect that the monk thing is more likely because Jobs was a member of a religious tradition that actually did that sort of thing. But without a lot more thinking this isn't much more than a vague intuition.

(this comment written after this one)

So you meant something like "counterfactually, it's more likely that Steve Jobs changed his mind about treatment than it is that he didn't get pancreatic cancer."

Indeed, I'm beginning to see that alternatives that are counterfactually likely have perhaps no relationship with nearby Everett branches. For example, 'if I didn't become a chemist I probably would have been a biologist' may be true but nevertheless might have nothing to say about how near the two possibilities are in terms of quantum states.

A few interesting hypotheses have occurred to me that I'd like to think about more, but right now I'm a little confused about how two nearby Everett branches would look. What would the first divergence look like?

Most of what we experience is classical, and thus an averaged process of zillions of quantum states. Thus seeing anything different would require a huge statistical anomaly. For example, it's theoretically possible that a teacup will start floating on a table but it would be very unlikely and it's kind of hard to believe in. Is this the kind of thing to expect in any nearby Everett branch that actually looks different?

So now that I know i'm looking for a locally concentrated statistical anomaly -- rather than a scattering of changed states here or there -- this directs me to consider weird/unlikely events at the molecular level.

So for example, in nearby Everett branches it is relatively near for someone to not be born (since presumably a smaller number of molecular events are required for a particular conception) but given that they're born, not near for them to make a different decision at a certain point in time because presumably many molecular interactions are averaged to form decisions.

So: easy for Steve Jobs to not be here, but difficult for him to make a different decision. However, Steve Jobs being born or Steve Jobs not being born result in very different universes.

I'm thinking that once you add 'causality' to the mix, there very little reason nearby Everett branches will look like one another, from our point of view. That is, if the differences are large enough for us to notice, the results could just as likely be huge as inconsequential.

I feel confused and wonder if someone has already dissolved this?