It’s conceivable that current level of belief in homeopathy is net positive in impact. The idea here would be that the vast majority of people who use it will follow up with actual medical treatment if homeopathy doesn’t solve their problem.
Assume also that medical treatment has non-trivial risks compared to taking sugar pills and infinitely dilute solutions (stats on deaths due to medical error support this thesis). And further that some conditions just get better by themselves. Now you have a situation where, just maybe, doing an initial ‘treatment’ with homeopathy gives you better outcomes because it avoids the risks associated with going to the doctor.
Probably not true. But the lack of any striking death toll from this relatively widespread belief makes me wonder. The modal homeopathy fan (of those I’ve personally known) has definitely been more along the lines of ‘mild hypochondriac who feels reassured by their bank of strangely labeled sugar pills’ than ‘fanatic who will die of appendicitis due to complete lack of faith in modern medicine’.
I’ve been making increasingly more genuine arguments about this regarding horoscopes. They’re not “scientific,” but neither are any of my hobbies, and they’re only harmful when taken to the extreme but that’s also true for all my hobbies, and they seem to have a bunch of low-grade benefits like “making you curious about your personality.” So then I felt astrology done scientifically (where you make predictions but hedge them and are really humble about failure) is way better than science done shoddily (where you yell at people for not wearing a mask to your intensity.) So I settled on the 52⁄48 rule—science, the truth, liberal democracy, all of these things have about a 2% edge over their enemies. It’s very rational to wind up in the 48 (a small mistake not a big one) and very hard to beat a 48 when you need to (like persuading people to take vaccines). I agree that humility is a good start. This seems to fit what I’ve lived through much better than my old ideology prior of like, 100-epsilon/epsilon.
It’s conceivable that current level of belief in homeopathy is net positive in impact. The idea here would be that the vast majority of people who use it will follow up with actual medical treatment if homeopathy doesn’t solve their problem.
Assume also that medical treatment has non-trivial risks compared to taking sugar pills and infinitely dilute solutions (stats on deaths due to medical error support this thesis). And further that some conditions just get better by themselves. Now you have a situation where, just maybe, doing an initial ‘treatment’ with homeopathy gives you better outcomes because it avoids the risks associated with going to the doctor.
Probably not true. But the lack of any striking death toll from this relatively widespread belief makes me wonder. The modal homeopathy fan (of those I’ve personally known) has definitely been more along the lines of ‘mild hypochondriac who feels reassured by their bank of strangely labeled sugar pills’ than ‘fanatic who will die of appendicitis due to complete lack of faith in modern medicine’.
I’ve been making increasingly more genuine arguments about this regarding horoscopes. They’re not “scientific,” but neither are any of my hobbies, and they’re only harmful when taken to the extreme but that’s also true for all my hobbies, and they seem to have a bunch of low-grade benefits like “making you curious about your personality.” So then I felt astrology done scientifically (where you make predictions but hedge them and are really humble about failure) is way better than science done shoddily (where you yell at people for not wearing a mask to your intensity.) So I settled on the 52⁄48 rule—science, the truth, liberal democracy, all of these things have about a 2% edge over their enemies. It’s very rational to wind up in the 48 (a small mistake not a big one) and very hard to beat a 48 when you need to (like persuading people to take vaccines). I agree that humility is a good start. This seems to fit what I’ve lived through much better than my old ideology prior of like, 100-epsilon/epsilon.