[bill_joy_fanboy]

> You're not a doctor, you're not qualified to tell the difference, you're not trained on cancers, you're not even in the medical field. The monopoly is held for exactly this reason.

The idea that a position of authority means ~anything~ anymore is completely ridiculous.

What did the medical field do to earn such credibility with you? Any intelligent person should have developed a high degree of skepticism regarding the operations of the medical field as of 2025.

[cogman10]

> What did the medical field do to earn such credibility with you?

For oncology? A whole lot. It's actually miraculous what they've developed to treat cancer. Cancer treatment has gotten so good that it's common for oncologists to caution against the 5 year study survival rates due to new and better treatments rapidly coming online. A 5 year study is necessarily 5 years out of date.

Medicine isn't a unified field. Having broad skepticism is an irrational position as there's a huge difference between the oncology field and the nutrition field.

[imglorp]

This opinion makes me sad.

There truly are experts in areas we can't--or shouldn't--all try to duplicate ourselves. Civilization is advanced by specialization. We identify these experts with a reputation system so you might call them authorities.

Similarly, there truly are institutions that have decades or more of people, procedures and culture to benefit society and a track record of these benefits.

The malicious erosion, by propaganda and by rhetoric, of the public's trust in our authorities and institutions is one of the biggest crimes of this century.

[jjk166]

It wasn't propaganda and rhetoric which eroded the public's trust. It was repeated attempts by authorities to argue based on their authority, instead of using their knowledge to actually make compelling arguments. When inevitably these experts and institutions got things wrong, they lost credibility because they staked their credibility.

We were never supposed to listen to experts because they were experts, experts were supposed to make good points people would listen to. It's shocking that we've grown so accustomed to crappy institutions that we've forgotten what a properly functioning institution even looks like.

[tjohns]

> The idea that a position of authority means ~anything~ anymore is completely ridiculous.

In that case, should we just get rid of licensure for professional engineers while we're at it? No special education or experience needed to build a bridge, nuclear reactors, or life-critical systems... since authority is meaningless now in the age of the internet?

The medical field isn't perfect, but it's hubris to believe that most people will perform better at treating disease than somebody with 11 years (minimum) of specialized education and countless hours of experience in a real clinical setting.

[advael]

There's a pretty stark difference between medical science, medical practitioners, and medical institutions.

Medical science has done a lot to earn credibility over the last couple hundred years. It fully eliminated a disease that was a leading cause of death in multiple human civilizations. It reduced rates of infant mortality by staggering numbers. It created vaccines and surgeries that have each saved countless lives and effectively cured life-altering disabilities and injuries, and demoted tons of diseases from death sentences to mere manageable disabilities or even mild temporary inconveniences

Medical practitioners are a mixed bag that ranges from total altruists to total mercenaries. Most people can learn a skill and incentivizing any skill via things like money or social status creates some goal-misalignment, but also dramatically increases the prevalence of the skill and also the community surrounding it, including research, pedagogy, and infrastructure. I think there's considerable value in not automatically trusting every medical practitioner, but on the whole many of them have earned credibility

Medical institutions have mostly been responsible for the existence of trustable practitioners and research, though in the rich world and especially the US specifically there are significant misalignments that come from capture from power-hungry parties in both government and the private sector. The American medical establishment in particular seems at this point near unsalvageable, having broken so badly that it often deliberately tanks quality of care to enforce state power or to turn a profit. We should probably rethink a lot of how institutions fund research, administer hospitals, prioritize care, act as financial buffers, what legal and enforcement authority we vest in medical practitioners sanctioned by the institutions, etc. So I agree with you there, especially in the United States specifically, though much of this was apparent well before 2025 (practically before I was born)