(3089/898) More observations and opinions

583) I have established an intuitive classification of the more serious and insidious perils that support our illusion of knowing, They are set out here, in a somewhat joking manner, as the Seven Deadly Sins:

1. Overconfidence


2. Illusory correlations (magical thinking)


3. Predictability in hindsight


4. Anchoring


5. Ease of representation


6. Probability blindness


7. Reconsideration under suitable scripts

Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Inevitable Illusions (1994)

584) Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

David Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) [B16]

585) Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

David Hume
Essays: Of Tragedy (1741) [B16]

586) No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous that the fact of which it endeavors to establish.

David Hume
Essays: Of Miracles (1741) [B16]

[Note: cf. #501]

587) Why are some people turning toward alternative [medical] therapies? According to [a British Medical Association] report: "It is particular interesting that these criticisms of medicine should appear at a time when the great modern developments in rational therapeutics and in diagnostic technique have revolutionized the effective treatment of many diseases and since the 1950s have greatly enhanced our expectations of medical science. These changes have altered also in significant and subtle ways the relation between patient and doctor. Relatively few years ago, when little therapeutic help could be offered, the physician devoted much time to counsel and to support the patient."

The report quotes a Council of Europe finding that the average alternative therapist spends eight times longer over a consultation than an average general practitioner. Many people long for the days when doctors were inclined to indulge in lengthy personal chats, and it is perhaps useful to be reminded that this was simply because there was often little else the could offer. It's ironic that today new diagnostic aids that can offer genuine medical help are likely to be regarded as "an intrusion juxtaposed between patient and physician."

Lewis Jones
"Alternative Therapies: A report on an inquiry
by the British Medical Association" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1987),
citing an (unnamed) BMA report (5/1986)

588) Modern America stresses narrowly trained specialists, not broad education. We should fear the politicized experts. If they remain outsiders, their demands ignored, they will become steadily more dangerous.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Humanity as Cancer"
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1/95)

589) Experience shows that populations stabilize when technology, women's education, and childhood life expectancy rise above a critical level. But on the way to this point lies a disaster zone: technology improves life expectancy and fuels a population boom, which then extracts a terrible toll from the environment.

To get the third world through the danger zone demands that they not follow our path to industrialization. Going through the "gray" technology of the nineteenth century would indeed yield mass pollution and gobble up resources. What the developing world needs is not giant dams, but cheap solar power collectors. Not steelworks, but composite material assembly sheds, weaving renewable organic resources into hard, light products. They need our future, not our past.

Lewis Thomas points out that it's this way in medicine. Low tech medicine is cheap - people get polio (say) or Salmonella, and die. Medium tech is nasty and expensive - iron lungs and keeping people alive when there is no good treatment for a disease is costly. Really high tech medicine, vaccine and antibiotics, is relatively cheap again, and everyone lives. The same thing happens with technology in developing countries - it has to be all or nothing. In between is the killer.

This suggests that techno-savvy development should probably be concentrated massively on small areas, to get them to a "post-industrial" level. This will avoid spreading investment thinly and falling short of the critical point. Such small, intensive cases will be experiments, yielding different schemes, seeing what works. If even the Earth Firsters can come to see that development need not mean deforestation and the Glen Canyon Dam, a new direction in resolute ecovirtue could open up.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Humanity as Cancer"
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1/95)

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 705 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.