Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
This may be true, but McArdle's point is precisely that this was not said before the study came out. At that time, people confidently expected that health insurance would, in fact, improve health outcomes. Your argument is one that was only made after the result was known; this is a classic failure mode.
This is a perspective similar to DanielLC's point. Additionally, a commenter there makes the parallel point that we don't really know whether private insurance improves the outcome measures.
True, but we shouldn't overstate the argument. The p-values were not low enough to count as "statistically significant," but the direction of change was towards improved health outcomes. One is doing something wrong with this evidence if one updates again... (read more)