Re: Reintroducing myself.

David Friedman wrote:

green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Catja Pafort) wrote:

David Friedman wrote:

Perhaps part of the problem is that that sounds awfully close, to my
ear, to "my mind is made up; don't confuse me with facts."

And if so... what is it to you? Go and bitch in private, bite your desk,
tell your dog how terribly terribly closeminded people are... but clamp
down on your compulsion to argue with them.

If I think it sounds that way and that the proper response is argument,
what is it to you?

When you give in to that impulse, you are poisoning a group I care
about. If you argue with your friends and family offline, with
commenters on your blog or website, or in any other forum where your
behaviour is appropriate, I couldn't give a damn. When you do it in
rasfc, it affects me.

Further, any time I express an opinion inconsistent with yours I am
telling you that I think you are wrong--and you are telling me that you
think I am.

I won't say that never happens, but most of the time when I am
expressing an opinion that differs from someone else's opinion, I am
saying 'I am having a different opinion.' I do not claim to know the
truth.

We all live in the same world. If my facts are true then you ought to
take them into account in your conclusions, if they are false I ought
not to take them into account in mine. You sound as though you think
each person lives in his private world, with his own set of facts.

I think that it is very, very difficult to measure facts and to
completely agree on them. There are a very small amount of measurable
facts that are difficult to dispute, but take something as simple as H2O
- chemically, it's very straightforward stuff, physically, it's pretty
straightforward stuff, and yet you can spend your whole life learning
more about it without ever knowing everything there is to know about H2O
- let alone about 'water.'


The particular fact I introduced concerned cancer survival rates. Do you
think that how successful a medical system is in curing people is
irrelevant to your opinion of it?

I think that cancer survival rates are _one_ measurement, but I do not
think it is the only or the most important one. But when you say 'cancer
survival rates' then the social scientist in me wants to know what,
exactly, was measured and by whom, what the detection rate was, whether
the figures were measured in ways that make them compatible, and, and,
and. I have a very small inkling of what can go wrong in producing a
nice, round number, and before I form any opinion based on something
called 'cancer survival rate' I want to know how, exactly, this number
was constructed.

A feat which, in all likelyhood, would take an experienced researcher in
the field several days (at least) to work out. Which is an amount of
effort that is completely out of proportion to the writing of a casual
usenet post.

For me, a number you casually quote - particularly if it is not a
verifiable number - is not 'a fact' but 'an assertion' - you post it
because it fits into your worldview, but it would be foolish of me to
change my opinion based on something so flimsy.

As it happens, I don't have an opinion on the complex measurements one
could construct to measure the efficiency of a health system. I can
think of several hundred factors that would flow into such a system, and
while I am capable of coming up with one, I do not have the months it
would take to do so, so I shall refrain. In the meantime, I fall back on
other measurements: if people are afraid to go to the doctor when they
are ill because they cannot afford to go, and if someone who suffered
from a ruptured appendix gets operated on and sent home the next day
because their family cannot afford a stay in hospital, I consider the
system to be severely flawed; whatever the cancer survival rates may be.


Catja

--
writing blog @ http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com
.

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