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by clairity 2058 days ago
it's not that doctors don't have specialized knowledge that might be stochastically predictive in specific cases, but that their experience, especially around something like a pandemic, skews their perspecive in ways that are very difficult to self-identify and compensate for. and that's on top of doctors holding their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views too.

in other words, expertise is narrow, and treatment experience isn't research.

1 comments

Everyone has their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views. I would not discount doctors' specialized knowledge as 'not science' (or worse, 'not evidence'). You just have to remember that medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).
that's intuition, not science. that doesn't mean it's not useful, it's just not useful as science. the point of the appeal to authority fallacy is to identify and unbias us against that kind of rhetorical trap in argumentation.