Mothers who think about whether or not to vaccinate their children usually don’t have any comparable source of evidence to “Doctor it hurts when I do this”.
Robin Hanson writes about how medicine is about caring and in this case the way a mother signals she cares for her child is about making her own personal research about vaccines. Then of course she has to talk to other mothers about it to make the signal of caring visible to the other mothers.
Unfortunately, doing such research for a routine intervention like vaccination doesn’t bring any good knowledge that allows oneself to make a better decision.
One member of our local LW meetup has a mother who was denied two times to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because of her wasp allergy. That would be the kind of event that actually warrents doing the personal research to get a better idea about whether or not it’s reasonable for the mother to seek another doctor to vaccinate her because it’s not a standard medical issue.
Isn’t most of the evidence that doctors use supposed to be public if laboursome to access?
How come you know the result of the research before doing it? If you don’t have faith and then as result of research agreed with the “majority” or standard view then that would produce the confidence/faith to proceed.
Off course if there is background paranoia that could be skewing the results but then it moves to the question whether that paranoia is warranted or not. As a non-expert is it ever reasonable to fail to follow expert opinion without becoming an expert yourself?
Mothers who think about whether or not to vaccinate their children usually don’t have any comparable source of evidence to “Doctor it hurts when I do this”.
Robin Hanson writes about how medicine is about caring and in this case the way a mother signals she cares for her child is about making her own personal research about vaccines. Then of course she has to talk to other mothers about it to make the signal of caring visible to the other mothers.
Unfortunately, doing such research for a routine intervention like vaccination doesn’t bring any good knowledge that allows oneself to make a better decision.
One member of our local LW meetup has a mother who was denied two times to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because of her wasp allergy. That would be the kind of event that actually warrents doing the personal research to get a better idea about whether or not it’s reasonable for the mother to seek another doctor to vaccinate her because it’s not a standard medical issue.
Isn’t most of the evidence that doctors use supposed to be public if laboursome to access?
How come you know the result of the research before doing it? If you don’t have faith and then as result of research agreed with the “majority” or standard view then that would produce the confidence/faith to proceed.
Off course if there is background paranoia that could be skewing the results but then it moves to the question whether that paranoia is warranted or not. As a non-expert is it ever reasonable to fail to follow expert opinion without becoming an expert yourself?