Remember how the Rationalists tried to use the epistemic status just
to help people with getting a feeling for just how fact checked
something was. Odd Scott forgot to include the epistemic status here,
prob an oversight, I assume he has included it in his other posts.
E: now im wondering, does his new blog have a āmistakes I madeā page,
or was that also axed?
E2: it is good to see Scott didnāt abandon his āRANDOM ALL CAPSā
trick.
Hi, Iām not a rationalist so Iām not very good at probability. Can
someone help me with a homework question Iām struggling with? I think
the FDA does bad with probability ~1. I pull an example at random to see
if they did bad or goodā but it turns out they did good in that
example??
Iām supposed to show my work on adjusting my priors. I wrote āmaybe
the FDA could be good?ā but my professor gave me 0 points and said the
right answer is āah but nevertheless.ā
Your problem is you didn't set the prior close enough to 1.
You should have lowered the probability of all of your other beliefs, such as 'I have a functioning brain' until the math worked out.
> I am super not a lawyer, but I think what happens is that insurances can declare some drugs to be not on their formulary, but if a doctor makes a case that the patient needs that drug anyway, they have to respond to the case, and if their response isn't good enough, they can get sued for not providing it.
he's a psychiatrist who doesnt understand how preauths work?? it's like one form and they give you the list of criteria
This is prob one of those subjects, like BLM which accidentally just never come up.
(E: Iirc he one said that he looked at the data and blue on black violence isnt that big of a problem (no source from me or him, so we can only guess if it was the old *unarmed* black men arent at risk bullshit), and he is smart enough to not do a big blogpost on 'the truth about police violence').
I cannot imagine how embarrassed I would be if I were accurately
dragged by Kevin āYouād be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a
population [the homeless] like thatā Drum.
Update: Scott has posted a rebuttal and linked it in the comments
of the blog and is getting his butt kicked by random commenters:
Your āresponseā, such as it is, is not responsive to Kevinās specific
points. Indeed, I notice that while Kevin includes direct quotes of what
you said to back up his claims, you ā¦ donāt tend to do this. No, you
prefer to substitute direct quotes of what was said with your
āinterpretationā of what he said.
Also, you have the very ugly trait ā common to libertarians ā of
never copping to an error on the grounds that doing so just gives your
opponent more ammunition.
Something that seems very important to this that Iām having a hard
time finding is how widespread usage of this drug was pre FDA approval.
This article says it was nearly to standard usage, Scottās article says
mostly at one hospital. If the first, little harm was done by the
delaying and Scottās desire to unbundle is already trueish (plus some
hoops to jump through), if the second then great harm was caused by the
ādeny by defaultā approach. Iām assuming the truth is somewhere in the
middle. Anybody happen to have good numbers for how widespread usage
was, or maybe ballpark numbers for how often requests for approval get
rejected for this sort of thing?
A few related things I want to point out. FDA couldnāt approve
because nobody applied. Approval took six years, somewhat faster than
average because they could avoid double blind testing. Omegaven has
already been approved in Europe, but the FDA was unable to use that (or
the evidence used for that) as grounds for approval because it didnāt
meet FDA specific standards, but they were able to use historical data
to approve it. What do all these have in common? People in the FDA
worked very hard to make things happen within the constraints of the
FDA, but were still massively inefficient and slow compared to what a
less cumbersome system could have achieved. People looking at any of
these things as evidence that Scottās thesis is wrong are missing the
point I think.
Convenient. Scott can never be wrong. Whenever he is it doesn't count because there's some greater underlying truth that can be inferred from the falsehoods by his compulsive fans.
When did I say that? He was wrong about some details of it, possibly to the point of this example not demonstrating what he wants it to (see my first paragraph). If you are taking issue with my last sentence, I'm not just making up this stance to fit the new information. From his original article:
>I want to stress that, despite my feelings about the FDA, I donāt think individual FDA bureaucrats, or even necessarily the FDA director, consistently make stupid mistakes. I think that given their mandate - approve drugs that definitely work, reject ones that are unsafe/ineffective, expect people to freak out and demand your head if any unsafe/ineffective drug gets through, nobody will care no matter how many lifesaving treatments you delay or stifle outright - theyāre doing the best they can. There are a few cases, like aducanumab, where it seems like they move a little faster than that mandate would suggest, and a few other cases, like infant nutrient fluid, where they move a little slower. But basically they are fulfilling their mandate to the best of the ability of the very smart people who work there.
And itās hard to even blame the people who set the FDAās mandate. Theyāre also doing the best they can given what kind of country / what kind of people we are. If some politician ever stopped fighting the Global War On Terror, then eventually some Saudi with a fertilizer bomb would slip through and kill \~5 people. And then everyone would tar and feather the politician who dared relax our vigilance, and we would all restart the Global War On Terror twice as hard, and drone strike twice as many weddings. This is true even if the War on Terror itself has an arbitrary cost in people killed / money spent / freedoms lost. The FDA mandate is set the same way - weāre open to paying limitless costs, as long as it lets us avoid a very specific kind of scandal which the media will turn into 24-7 humiliation of whoever let it happen. If I were a politician operating under these constraints, Iām not sure I could do any better.
So the long-term solution is to become a different kind of country and different sorts of people - eg raise the sanity waterline. This will have nice side benefits like also ending the global war on terror. But until then, are there any small changes that would help around the edges?
I get that we are in sneerclub and principle of charity is not generally practiced here, but it is hard to interpret that as saying "The FDA is made up of all evil people who don't care if babies die" or similar things that people are saying here.
Forgive me, but there seem to be some severe inconsistencies between the original thesis of the story, with
> Every single thing the FDA does is like this. Every single hour of every single day the FDA does things exactly this stupid and destructive
and this bit, and your even softer re-interpretations of it,
> I donāt think individual FDA bureaucrats, or even necessarily the FDA director, consistently make stupid mistakes.
We've gone from "every single thing" being "stupid and destructive" literally "every hour of every day" to "not stupid". Your interpretation, "Theyāre also doing the best they can given what kind of country / what kind of people we are" seems ever further away from the thesis.
These are just not similar things.
Also,
> but it is hard to interpret that as saying "The FDA is made up of all evil people who don't care if babies die"
Actually this is *the only possible* interpretation of the original claims. Let's analyze it. If the FDA ever cared whether babies died, they would take action to minimize babies dying. But such an action would not be "stupid and destructive", and therefore the FDA is claimed not to be capable of it. So we can only conclude that in Scott's mind, the FDA doesn't care about babies dying.
Fair enough, Scott has a habit of making grand sweeping claims then following them up with caveats that invalidate that claim. After taking all the caveats into account I think he makes genuinely insightful and generally correct claims most of the time, but I get how frustrating that would be for someone more predisposed to disagree than to agree.
A writer I like has a habit of saying a thing then following it up by saying the opposite. If I ignore whichever one of these is incorrect in hindsight, he is always right.
Thereās a huge difference between making a strong statement that you mostly agree with and breaking it down with caveats vs. throwing out ideas in the hopes that one will be right. Itās very clear what his position is, and a throwaway comment where he says āeverything the FDA does is like thisā instead of āthe FDA does things like this with inordinately high frequencyā doesnāt actually make him harder to understand. It does add fuel to people who want to misrepresent his argument, so it would maybe be wise not to do that, but honestly I think it makes for more engaging writing without *actually* sacrificing clarity.
There isnāt any particular reason to āassumeā that the truth is somewhere in the middle, either you do your own research or you recuse yourself from having an opinion, if you think that the original Siskind has enough merit to merit an opinion of your own
As regards the allegedly cumbersome FDA (not an unfair accusation in *general*, but itās a big organisation), your accusation proves too much: sure, the restrictions within which the FDA are forced to work are a bit shit, as with most government organisations in America. The FBI sucks too. But Siskindās point is that (a) the FDA didnāt do its job, (b) deliberately obstructed the dissemination of a life-saving drug, and only (c) should have been permitted to try out a few things or been abolished.
The final fact is that historically he was straightforwardly incorrect even if FDA reform is something to be desired, and I donāt think anyone should want to reform any government organisation on the grounds of what somebody *that wrong* has opinions on.
Shoot first, ask questions/backpedal later š Muh ratiocinations.
āfails fact checkingā
Remember how the Rationalists tried to use the epistemic status just to help people with getting a feeling for just how fact checked something was. Odd Scott forgot to include the epistemic status here, prob an oversight, I assume he has included it in his other posts.
E: now im wondering, does his new blog have a āmistakes I madeā page, or was that also axed?
E2: it is good to see Scott didnāt abandon his āRANDOM ALL CAPSā trick.
Hi, Iām not a rationalist so Iām not very good at probability. Can someone help me with a homework question Iām struggling with? I think the FDA does bad with probability ~1. I pull an example at random to see if they did bad or goodā but it turns out they did good in that example??
Iām supposed to show my work on adjusting my priors. I wrote āmaybe the FDA could be good?ā but my professor gave me 0 points and said the right answer is āah but nevertheless.ā
Can anyone help show me what I did wrong?
How all good science begins.
Academics and experts hate this savantās method: one weird trick
Lmao another example of Scott skimming documents and getting it backwards
not sure that is quite correct, but i guess that could be a problem for a medical practitioner
ā¦.
i was going to guess the drug in question was phenibut but thatās still legal here. better check gwern for other possible drugs
Having read only the title, i wonder how Scott feels about puberty blockers for trans kids? Like, legitimately curious.
I cannot imagine how embarrassed I would be if I were accurately dragged by Kevin āYouād be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population [the homeless] like thatā Drum.
Update: Scott has posted a rebuttal and linked it in the comments of the blog and is getting his butt kicked by random commenters:
Something that seems very important to this that Iām having a hard time finding is how widespread usage of this drug was pre FDA approval. This article says it was nearly to standard usage, Scottās article says mostly at one hospital. If the first, little harm was done by the delaying and Scottās desire to unbundle is already trueish (plus some hoops to jump through), if the second then great harm was caused by the ādeny by defaultā approach. Iām assuming the truth is somewhere in the middle. Anybody happen to have good numbers for how widespread usage was, or maybe ballpark numbers for how often requests for approval get rejected for this sort of thing?
A few related things I want to point out. FDA couldnāt approve because nobody applied. Approval took six years, somewhat faster than average because they could avoid double blind testing. Omegaven has already been approved in Europe, but the FDA was unable to use that (or the evidence used for that) as grounds for approval because it didnāt meet FDA specific standards, but they were able to use historical data to approve it. What do all these have in common? People in the FDA worked very hard to make things happen within the constraints of the FDA, but were still massively inefficient and slow compared to what a less cumbersome system could have achieved. People looking at any of these things as evidence that Scottās thesis is wrong are missing the point I think.
Love sneerclub because it makes fun of all the times Scott is incontrovertibly correct. Itās like using a magnet to find the needle in a haystack.