In general if you list everything you can think of and give it probability scores, you ignore unknown unknowns.
For medical interventions like surgery unknown unknowns are more likely to be bad than to be good.
As a result it’s useful to have a prior against doing a medical intervention if there no strong evidence that the intervention is beneficial.
Maybe we need to visualize surgery different. I used to think about it like replacing a part in a car. Why not just do it if the part is not working too well.
Maybe we should see it as damage. It’s like someone attacking you with a knife. Except that the intention is completely different, they know what they are doing, their implements are far more precise and so on, so the parallel is not very good either, I am just saying that “recovering from an appendicitis” could be at least visualized as something closer to “recovering after a nasty knife fight” than to “just had the clutch in my car replaced”.
In general if you list everything you can think of and give it probability scores, you ignore unknown unknowns. For medical interventions like surgery unknown unknowns are more likely to be bad than to be good.
As a result it’s useful to have a prior against doing a medical intervention if there no strong evidence that the intervention is beneficial.
Maybe we need to visualize surgery different. I used to think about it like replacing a part in a car. Why not just do it if the part is not working too well.
Maybe we should see it as damage. It’s like someone attacking you with a knife. Except that the intention is completely different, they know what they are doing, their implements are far more precise and so on, so the parallel is not very good either, I am just saying that “recovering from an appendicitis” could be at least visualized as something closer to “recovering after a nasty knife fight” than to “just had the clutch in my car replaced”.
What do you think?
Why do you think we need to do so?