People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always “just stop beleiving” if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there’s an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn’t get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don’t naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It’s outside our ancestoral environment, so we’re not equiped to be able to automatically discard “obviously” bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.
There’s two components to it, really:
People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always “just stop beleiving” if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there’s an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn’t get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don’t naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It’s outside our ancestoral environment, so we’re not equiped to be able to automatically discard “obviously” bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.