That said, why some things are widely adopted or not is generally not that clear-cut to me (e.g. was the reason the lack of evidence or to save masks for healthcare workers?)
There was a lack of evidence (in terms of how EBM sees evidence). There was good pathophysiological reasoning to believe that the masks are helpful. The sane thing to do would been to perscribe masks based on the pathophysiological reasoning. The motivation of saving masks for healthcare workers was one reason not to engage in the sane action.
Looking at more information was not the key to the mask issue. The key was to actually engage in pathophysiological reasoning. I don’t think you can improve on the mainstream flow by simply looking at more sources of information without engaging in reasoning.
The problem with wisdom is that it often can’t be reduced to simply heuristics.
Mentally it’s important to distinguish questions that you can easily answer from questions where it’s hard to know things. The question about whether or not Fearies or Trolls exist is a question for which is easy to answer. In medicine you have a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer and where there no conclusive evidence to answer them either way.
For the reasons EY layed out in Inadequate Equilibria there’s good reason to believe that it’s often possible to improve on standard guidelines for medical questions.
There was a lack of evidence (in terms of how EBM sees evidence). There was good pathophysiological reasoning to believe that the masks are helpful. The sane thing to do would been to perscribe masks based on the pathophysiological reasoning. The motivation of saving masks for healthcare workers was one reason not to engage in the sane action.
Looking at more information was not the key to the mask issue. The key was to actually engage in pathophysiological reasoning. I don’t think you can improve on the mainstream flow by simply looking at more sources of information without engaging in reasoning.
The problem with wisdom is that it often can’t be reduced to simply heuristics.
Mentally it’s important to distinguish questions that you can easily answer from questions where it’s hard to know things. The question about whether or not Fearies or Trolls exist is a question for which is easy to answer. In medicine you have a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer and where there no conclusive evidence to answer them either way.
For the reasons EY layed out in Inadequate Equilibria there’s good reason to believe that it’s often possible to improve on standard guidelines for medical questions.