I think you are vastly overestimating the 2001-2010 internet's ability to preserve and catalog evidence.
I would like to add a small element of purely anecdotal evidence to this debate as an avid follower of the "warblogs" and discussions at the time which is slightly different from the "he was pro torture before he was against it" take in your post. My general understanding is that Hitchens was always against "torture" (disagree with Nance's take on this) but there was both a legal and moral debate about water boarding qualifying as torture. For example see this NPR story from 2014: https://www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260155065/cia-lawyer-waterboarding-wasnt-torture-then-and-isnt-torture-now
Hitchens decided to answer the question for himself and came firmly down on the "it is torture and therefore wrong" side of the debate afterwards. He was initially wrong but continued to be intellectually consistent throughout.
It's articles like these that make it clear that trying to extend rationalism to every aspect of the human condition is doomed to fail, and not only to fail, but to make anybody who makes the attempt seem like an alien to normal people.
There are people who have been Talking about the different types of love and what love actually means thousands of years. The Greeks talked about the difference between Eros and Agape. Today on poly forms, you can see people talking about all the different types of love they have for their partners throwing around words like "new relationship energy" and "limerance." Well known biblical quotes like "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," makes it clear that there are different types of love.
Most people are just comfortable with context clues instead of working down a flow diagram to make sure they are using the perfect word at the moment.
For example, if someone asks me how I'm feeling and I say "bad" the fact that I have the flu vs if I just got a divorce is enough to clue most people in to the fact that the words "feel" and "bad" are referring to physically and emotionally respectively. Most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to progress.
The FDA does not provide good guidance on what treatments should be applied in what situations. They approve drugs for a limited set of uses and that's it. Most drugs are applied "off label" which the FDA rules that drug companies specifically cannot comment on -- so not only does the FDA not provide guidance on the most common use for most medications, they actually prevent that guidance from being provided.
You mean the Theranos that is specifically regulated by CLIAA and Medicare which did nothing to stop them until they actually destroyed people's lives?
Or you can buy UL listed ones that work. The UL is a private organization. Which again goes to prove his point.
Why are you nervous to predict the drug doesn't work? Your take seems reasonable and opinion isn't liable so?
Because you can't make money off of it (by definition) so no-one wants to work hard enough on it to make it work. Sort of like communism itself.
VCs are already doing this. They have offered to buy both the oral surgery practice and the dental practice I use in town.
The care they provide turns worse and worse because the model you envision turns a professional (someone who should have a fiduciary responsibility to the patient's best interest above their own) into an employee of a non-professional corporation. All of the pre-and postoperative care that you envision being done by less highly paid individuals in order to free up the surgeon to "generate profit" gets done cheaply and more slapdash resulting in worse and worse patient care. Either the oral surgeon fights back and attempts to maintain the physician patient relationship and gets fired from their own practice that they sold out (pretty common already with Derm and Optho) or they don't and you get the actual medical version of the plastic surgery chop shops common in Miami. This ethical problem is why non-lawyers cannot own a legal practice and yet we failed to recognize the same destruction of the professional relationship when it comes to physicians.
Aspen dental is a franchise based venture capital funded organization that already does this.
This is where rationalists fall apart. Everything you say makes sense, but it doesn't take into account the sociocultural aspects that make a physician patient relationship different than the value extractive relationship that you propose.