If brevity was the issue, I wouldn't have expected him to say 5 instead of 9. And I would have expected him to use stronger language than he did. My honest impression is that he thinks that the chances that it's something are really small, but nothing approaching infinitesimally small.
I'd say an expert in any field has better intuitions (hidden, unverbalized knowledge) than what they can express in words or numbers. Therefore, I'd assume that the decision that it's not worth doing the examination should take priority over the numerical estimate that he made up after you asked.
It may be better to ask the odds in such cases, like 1 to 10,000 or 1 to a million. Anyway, it's really hard to express our intuitive, expert-knowledge in such numbers. They all just look like "big numbers".
Another problem is that nobody is willing to put a dollar value on your life. Any such value would make you upset (maybe you are the exception, but most people probably would). Say the examination costs $100 (just an example). Then if he's 99.95% sure you aren't sick, and 0.05% sure you are dying and sends you home, then he (rather your insurance) values your life at less than $200,000. This is a very rough estimation, but it seems in the right ballpark for what a general stranger's life seems to be valued by the whole population. Of course it all depends on how much insurance you pay, how expensive the biopsy is etc. Maybe you are right that you deserve to be examined for your money, maybe not. But people tend to avoid this sort of discussion because it is very emotionally-loaded. So we mainly mumble around the topic.
People are dying all the time out of poverty, waiting on waiting lists, not having insurance, not being able to pay for medicaments. But of course people who have more money can override this by buying better medical care. Depending on the country there are legal and not-so-legal methods to get better healthcare. You could buy a better package legally, put some cash in the doctor's coat, etc.
You need to consider that the people who'd do your biopsy can do other things as well, for example work on someone's biopsy who has a chance of 1% of dying instead of your 0.05% (assuming this figure is meaningful and not just a forced, uncalibrated guess).
If you confronted your doctor with these things, he'd probably prefer to just revoke that probability estimate and just say his expert opinion is that you don't need the biopsy, end of story. It would be very hard for you to argue with this.
I went to the dermatologist and today and I have some sort of cyst on my ear. He said it was nothing. He said the options are to remove it surgically, to use some sort of cream to remove it over time, or to do nothing.
I asked about the benefits of removing it. He said that they'd be able to biopsy it and be 100% sure that it's nothing. I asked "as opposed to... how confident are you now?" He said 99.5 or 99.95% sure.
It seems clear to me that the costs of money, time and pain are easily worth the 5/1000(0) chance that I detect something dangerous earlier and correspondingly reduce the chances that I die. Like, really really really really really clear to me. Death is really bad. I'm horrified that doctors (and others) don't see this. He was very ready to just send me home with his diagnosis of "it's nothing". I'm trying to argue against myself and account for biases and all that, but given the badness of death, I still feel extremely strongly that the surgery+biopsy is the clear choice. Is there something I'm missing?
Also, the idea of Prediction Book for Doctors occurred to me. There could be a nice UI with graphs and stuff to help doctors keep track of the predictions they've made. Maybe it could evolve into a resource that helps doctors make predictions by providing medical info and perhaps sprinkling in a little bit of AI or something. I don't really know though, the idea is extremely raw at this point. Thoughts?
Saying 99.9999% seems a mouthful. Would you have preferred an answer like this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWpSvQ_hwo :)
Yes I'm familiar with his most famous paper and what he says about medical research findings. Has he ever endorsed MetaMed in particular? If peer reviewed research finding are often false, how can MetaMed tell the difference without trying to replicate them? Different research papers use different assumptions, differently calibrated measurements, different subjects, it seems very hard to aggregate this in practice, although I'm not a medical researcher. Why should I believe that a company started by futurists and entrepreneurs would be up to this task? Where is the evidence for the actual efficacy of their particular methodology, as evaluated by independent third-parties?
it's almost the same as my opinion
Really? You consider MetaMed unethical and dangerous. Robin Hanson considers it a useful source of second opinions but thinks it may not be all that much better than second opinions from other sources (e.g. doctors).
You say "I find this absolutely shocking and reading the endorsement of this company on this website"
Robin Hanson says "Even so, I would very much like to see a much stronger habit of getting second opinions, and a much larger industry to support that habit. I thus hope that MetaMed succeeds."
if there is no legal risk for doing so
MetaMed has been granted immunity from lawsuits..?
The legal risks are lesser if you are a licensed MD.
Upon more reflection, I'm not able to defend my point and my thoughts are confused and therefore I'm gravitating towards the established and mainstream viewpoint that only licensed and authorized doctos should do doctor stuff. On uncertain territory it's better to stick to well-known landmarks. Since I'm not confident in my capability of a deep enough analysis of the pros and cons, I feel that the way to convince me would be to first convince people who are experts of the medical field and of the regulations, towards whom I already have an established chain of trust.
this company takes medicine's research results and then say they can handle and aggregate it better than the doctors who are licensed to do exactly that
Doctors are not licensed to "handle and aggregate" research results. They are licensed to treat people as best as they can and keeping up with the latest academic research is not a requirement for keeping their license. In fact, most doctors are too busy treating people to allocate enough time to read research.
this post induces distrust in legally-professed medicine
I consider this a good thing and I say this as someone who has doctors in the family and doctors among friends. Medics are not gods and not even engineers -- an attempt to make medicine "evidence-based" is proceeding over a lot of screaming and dragging heels. In some areas -- like e.g. surgery -- contemporary medicine is pretty good. In other areas -- like e.g. nutrition -- it's pretty bad.
And what's up with your obsession with "legally-professed"? Getting a license doesn't magically grant you smarts and competence. There are a lot of different doctors and some of them are really not good doctors.
...without actually formally, academically challenging the status quo
I believe their advice is based on published medical research which is precisely what you are asking for.
I just found Robin Hanson's critique and it's almost the same as my opinion.
My obsession over legally-professed is that it's a lot easier to give actionable options if there is no legal risk for doing so. Why won't they take all the legal risks of giving actual medical advice instead of just actionable options?
They are promoting an anti-establishment, private, non-supervised spinoff version of medicine
That's an excellent idea and I endorse it :-P Particularly the "non-supervised" part. I am not quite sure what do you mean by "spinoff", though. What is spun off what?
as practiced in legally supervised hospitals and medical establishments
What exactly is a "legally supervised hospital" and who's doing the supervising?
There is a reason why healthcare professionals have to go through certain legal procedures before they are allowed to give medical advice.
Do tell. Is it to make lawyers rich?
By spinoff I mean that this company takes medicine's research results and then say they can handle and aggregate it better than the doctors who are licensed to do exactly that and then they start to do at least a part of it (giving certain limited kinds of advice or certain limited kinds of health reports that aren't legally considered medical advice).
Playing with medicine is a dangerous field. For example this post induces distrust in legally-professed medicine at a time when "alternative medicine" is getting more and more popular (homeopathy, Chinese traditional "medicine", etc.). Dismissing experts and starting your own better version of the field without actually formally, academically challenging the status quo and showing how your method would be better, seems very wrong to me. They should go and reform medicine to be the way it should be (if it really is broken) from the inside and by taking the legal burden of giving out actual medical advice. If their method works, they should publish their superior results in peer-reviewed medical journals and get their methods into regular practice. Have they done such a thing? I couldn't find such a thing on their website.
They essentially say that they will give some non-medical advice but the real weight of potential legal ramifications still has to lie on the (according to this post) incompetent licensed medical professional. If he disagrees with the company, the patient may get angry for having wasted the money, so they may look for a licensed doctor who is willing to do the stuff that the company's literature review might indicate.
The way this post dismisses medical experts reminds me of the way Scientology dismisses psychiatry.
Do tell. Is it to make lawyers rich?
No, for patient safety.
(Certainly, MetaMed doesn't endanger patient safety by giving out reports that have to be acknowledged by a licensed doctor, but they make it look as if the doctor couldn't decide himself and needed external help. This in turn decreases the trust in medicine and could potentially increase the trust in all of the alternative crap like homeopathy and faith healing, too.)
It's somewhat like hiring legally-not-responsible people who'd keep telling civil engineers who are experts at bridge design how they should change stuff here and there and that they don't really know what they are doing.
I think we're still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it's clear a priori that it can't, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: "what's the thing that all dogs have in common?"- and you're trying to tell me it's misguided to look for some platonic 'essence of dogness'. Concepts don't work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, "all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it's no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist." I.e., you're assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like 'dogness' than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any 'universal' or 'rigorous' theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It's no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don't have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don't have yet (Tononi's IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let's not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I'm not sure it does, but I think it's more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness "may" also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if "irregardless" or "wanna" are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that's where you should look for "good", maybe "pleasure" is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about "inherently pleasurable" arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
What this company is doing might indirectly lead to very dangerous situations. They are promoting an anti-establishment, private, non-supervised spinoff version of medicine, where they don't give medical advice but give advice on how to try getting treated by medical professionals. By this they are creating distrust in mainstream medicine and this blog post is helping them in their dismissal of medicine as practiced in legally supervised hospitals and medical establishments, since this post lists studies which show that medicine is "bad" but shows no studies about whether MetaMed is any better. There is a reason why healthcare professionals have to go through certain legal procedures before they are allowed to give medical advice.
MetaMed is not a licensed healthcare provider. ALL INFORMATION AND CONTENT IS PROVIDED FOR GENERAL INFORMATIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT MEANT TO BE AND IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE, DIAGNOSIS OR TREATMENT PROVIDED BY A PHYSICIAN OR OTHER QUALIFIED AND LICENSED HEALTHCARE, CLINICAL OR MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL PURSUANT TO PERSONAL IN-PERSON EXAMINATION AND PROFESSIONAL CONSULTATION. The information and content is neither intended to dictate what constitutes reasonable, appropriate or best care for any given health issue, nor is it intended to be used as a substitute for the independent judgment of a physician or other healthcare professional for any given health issue.
I find this absolutely shocking and reading the endorsement of this company on this website makes me seriously reconsider what is going on around here.
Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It's deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc
It seems like you're making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a 'natural kind', that it doesn't 'carve reality at the joints', and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).
I don't like the expression "carve reality at the joints", I think it's very vague and hard to verify if a concept carves it there or not. The best way I can imagine this is that you have lots of events or 'things' in some description space and you can notice some clusterings, and you pick those clusters as concepts. But a lot depends on which subspace you choose and on what scale you're working... 'Good' may form a cluster or may not, I just don't even know how you could give evidence either way. It's unclear how you could formalize this in practice.
My thoughts on pleasure and the concept of good is that your problem is that you're trying to discover the sharp edges of these categories, whereas concepts don't work like that. Take a look at this LW post and this one from Slatestarcodex. From the second one, the concept of a behemah/dag exists because fishing and hunting exist.
Try to make it clearer what you're trying to ask. "What is pleasure really?" is a useless question. You may ask "what is going on in my body when I feel pleasure?" or "how could I induce that state again?"
You seem to be looking for some mathematical description of the pattern of pleasure that would unify pleasure in humans and aliens with totally unknown properties (that may be based on fundamentally different chemistry or maybe instead of electomagnetism-based chemistry their processes work over the strong nuclear force or whatever). What do you really have in mind here? A formula, like a part of space giving off pulses at the rate of X and another part of space at 1 cm distance pulsating with rate Y?
You may just as well ask how we would detect alien life at all. And then I'd say "life" is a human concept, not a divine platonic object out there that you can go to and see what it really is. We even have edge cases here on Earth, like viruses or prions. But the importance of these sorts of questions disappears if you think about what you'd do with the answer. If it's "I just want to know how it really is, I can't imagine doing anything practical with the answer" then it's too vague to be answered.
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Alternative hypothesis 2
(At this point I should point out that I like your hypothesis, I just think it is not necessarily single-cause)
Satoshi Kanazawa's charmingly simple theory that general intelligence tends to suppress and displace most of your instincts. This means being smart pretty much automatically means being bad at a lot of things. The way I interpret it is that attention is a finite resource and you either pay attention to your analytical engine or your instincts or share it, but you cannot give full 100% attention to both. So if the analytical engine demands your attention the insticts shut up/down.
I have observed intelligent people being bad at the following instinctive things (not all of them, not in all of these):
This may be a case of ignoring people who are bad in both intellectual and physical things. Those people are just not salient, the same way as people think smart people are ugly and beautiful people are dumb. It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed. This is Berkson's paradox: Even if A and B are independent, they are dependent conditioned on (A or B).