Minchin’s Mistake
At Less Wrong, Vladimir Nesov approvingly cites Tim Minchin's poem Storm, vid here, text here. It is an entertaining, passionate, articulate rant against fuzzy-headed thinking. It is also seriously misguided:
By definition, (I begin)
Alternative medicine, (I continue)
Is either not been proved to work,
Or been proved, not to work.
Do you know what they call
'Alternative Medicine'
That's been proved to work?
— Medicine …
But, here's what gives me a hard-on,
I'm a tiny, insignificant
Ignorant bit of carbon.
I have one life,
And it is short and unimportant,
But thanks to recent scientific advances…
I get to live twice as long,
As my great-great-great-great
uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long!
Sadly, most anti-mystics think their strongest case is medicine. They don't realize that the vast majority of medical treatments have no better supporting "scientific" evidence than the alternative medicine they deride, nor that modern medicine can only claim credit for a small fraction of our lifespan gains. Someone needs to school them; they make the rest of us anti-mystics look bad!
Added: A colleague assures me most economic historians estimate we would be pretty much just as rich and healthy today had the only "scientists" been researchers funded directly by firms, with no government, charity, or student funding.
Alex, vaccination counts as med, but not food or washing, neither of which is plausibly "science."
[jaw drops] Food and washing aren't medicine, but not science? That's just crazy talk. Germ theory of disease. Vitamins. Iodized salt reduces endemic goiter. Come on!
I'm curious how the development of nuclear power would have gone in a world where the state didn't develop and fund it. Would it be as far developed as it is now, or would it only be developed when Gas/Coal was very rare and expensive? Also I'm not sure the internet would have looked the same as it does now if it hadn't spun off from arpa net. It would probably be far more heavily controlled, like compuserve etc.
So I'm not really sure how the economic historians can construct their counter factual hypotheses with any degree of accuracy.