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by apatil
1018 days ago
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I find it plausible that it's often a good idea in medicine to be conservative before launching interventions that may have adverse side effects, but have difficulty swallowing the idea that this conservatism should be implemented by reducing visibility (eg by not applying tests too broadly if they have a nontrivial false positive rate and the condition is rare). It seems like the right thing to do would be to maximize visibility, but then to try to corroborate and not overreact to apparent positives. |
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Far easier said than done. What actually happens when you get caught in one of these screening programs, is that you're suddenly in a universe of "continuous monitoring"...because they're trying to find the birds, and reason that since they looked at you once, they need to look at you more intensely than before.
Anyone who has ever had a mole biopsied for skin cancer will be familiar with this. They'll just keep looking for stuff, until you tell them to stop. If you get a positive, it's even worse. Everyone is acting with good intentions. It's just impossible to know the right answer, so the emergent behavior of the system is to harm people.