[projektfu]

Doctors are always thinking about the potential for harm in their therapies but you don't always have a lot of options. For example, amoxicillin is the standard of care for strep but some people are allergic. Azithromycin is also standard but overuse of macrolides is driving resistance in organisms that are already resistant to other antibiotics.

I understand the article is really trying to reach into medicine to find the reason to push back on other actions. If doctors recognize they can cause harm when they try to heal, so must other practitioners, presumably politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, marketers, activists, parents, etc.

It's not enough to identify the problem. We can bias for or against intervention. But neither bias is scientific or necessarily likely to produce a good outcome without externalities or adverse effects. Ideally we would try more things with small samples and also try to understand externalities, comparing that to other possible interventions or nonintervention. However, the status quo bias also has an implicit blind spot, which is assuming that things will remain the same. Unfortunately, conditions do change.

We also have a problem with the moral aspect of the question. Who has the right to intervene? Who has an obligation? Is it moral to decline to intervene? If you intervene for good reasons, but cause bad outcomes, is that a moral failing? Is one person's assessment of the outcome more morally correct than another's?