[free2OSS]

Epidemiologists are the experts, I'm baffled why so many people are asking physicians about coronavirus.

Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.

It goes to show how few people understand what Science is and probably more dangerously that Medical is mistakenly thought as Science. (Medical is older than the scientific revolution,it's a hybrid of Tradition/Authority/Art/Science)

[giardini]

ree2OSS says>"Epidemiologists are the experts"<

Epidemiology of COVID-19 has been a train wreck. Indeed we must ask if epidemiology is a science at all.

Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information. One might as well simplify the selection criteria and interview 700 (or better, simply 30) people of above-average intelligence.

ree2OSS says>"Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions."<

I agree with the first sentence but not with the second. Most medical organizations/hospitals/institutions/clinics are headed up by physicians who make policy decisions all day long.

[onecommentman]

“Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information.”

Do you seriously believe there is “no useful information” from such an exercise? None? Methinks you are being facetious.

I agree you shouldn’t necessarily follow what they say they do, but even realizing there is a diversity of responses among those who have some formal training is surely of some value. Especially among the target audience of the NYT that tends to believe what an authority tells them more than the average American.

[rscho]

Epidemiologists are also MDs. And epidemiology also is a hybrid of the kind you mention. Dogmas exist in every science, and although it is true that clinical medicine is far behind other disciplines regarding getting rid of dogmas, things are improving steadily.

Epidemiologists don't always understand better regarding what to do in practice. They understand things in their own manner shaped by their profession and that's exactly what we ask of them.

[jhbadger]

Some are MDs, but most have a Ph.D or MPH (Master of Public Health) instead or in addition to a MD. Epidemiology is a science and one that is not well covered in medical schools.

[rscho]

Epidemiology is a science as much as for instance infectiology is a science. An aggregate of best practices relying only partially on hard (experimental or mathematical) science. For example IMO, the Bradford Hill criteria are backed by informal reasoning and although seemingly trivially logical, are very much dogmatic in nature.

It's true that many epidemiologists are not MDs, though. I formulated my thoughts badly in that regard.

[bane]

Most people don't really understand that.

Even relatively informed people don't understand that physicians aren't members of the scientific class and in practice are closer to car mechanics than fuel chemists.

A person with a DMA, DPA, or a DMM are all still called "Doctor" colloquially, but not people with a JD.

A Doctorate of Science should by the sound of it be the one that members of the science class have, not a PhD, but it curiously represents both an award that's equivalent, beyond, and less than a PhD depending on who awards it and how it's awarded -- and is curiously often the degree of choice for medical doctors and other health practitioners but almost never the degree for chemists, biologists, physicists or other sciences.

Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD.

[ghaff]

>Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD

I think you sort of answered why institutions often award a PhD rather than ScD/DSc/etc. (And there are some related examples related to Masters degrees.) If there's an industry job opening for a PhD, how many ScD resumes end up getting filtered out because the candidate doesn't have the "right" degree? I've definitely heard this type of thing on occasion from graduates who don't or at least didn't award the standard degrees. Even my undergraduate degree isn't quite "normal" (SB vs. BS) so I use the standard form on my resume not that it matters at this point.

[bane]

I can't remember at the moment, either Harvard or John Hopkins was phasing out the ScD because it didn't have the "brand" recognition of the PhD and for years both degrees had exactly the same programs.

[disown]

> Physicians are not scientists

Neither are epidemiologists.

> they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.

Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.

> It goes to show how few people understand what Science is

Ain't that the truth.

[gnusty_gnurc]

> Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.

Even politicians aren't that good at solving this issue clearly.

It's because centralization is bad at responding to the needs of individuals.

> The reason that this top-down bureaucratic management approach does not work is because the knowledge we need to plan is local, widely dispersed, and held by individuals. Hayek’s point, which won him Nobel honors in 1974, was that there is no such thing as a centralized repository of knowledge from which epidemiologists, policy-makers, or anyone else “in charge” can pull any required data at any time and then — poof — solve societal problems. He further warned that we must treat economic problems differently from scientific problems. Truer words have not been spoken regarding how we should think about the COVID-19 pandemic. Successfully containing COVID-19 is a problem that both requires scientific investigation and economic thinking.

https://spectator.org/covid-experts-shutdowns/