Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> I think it's a clever twist of the word "authority"

There is overwhelming evidence that established science is correct, and the scientists are using objectively powerful techniques to establish truth.

However, the mechanisms society at large uses to test and assimilate that knowledge are exactly the same as those used for religious authority. The major difference is that rituals invoking science tend to correlate much more closely with getting the outcome we expect than rituals invoking the gods.

Picking on doctors as representatives of the scientific establishment, there isn't much difference from an average person's perspective going to a doctor or a faith healer. Person has a problem, they go to an authority figure, things they don't understand happen, and then hopefully they get a good outcome - no guarantee though. From the perspective of the patient's decision making process, there is no difference.

What is different is the advice from the social network will (hopefully) be 'don't see the faith healer; see the doctor'. That is the only difference in practice between the two decisions.

Monitoring and criticising how the underlying mechanisms work is a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry and place to dissent. There are interesting ethical questions here about who needs to do what to fulfill their ethical requirements between what the patient's responsibilities are given their limited understanding, the social network's responsibility given their third-party status and the authority figure's role in how to represent themselves.

Fully agree (I am a mathematician). People believe scientists based on authority arguments. The alternative would be to believe them because they validated their work. Even among scientists, this is a very hard thing to do. Among mathematicians is close to impossible. The solution agreed since some decades is peer review, but peer review != validation.

As an extreme example about what people believe based on authority arguments, consider the case of a deep mathematician (Dan Barbilian) who was also a great hermetic poet (pen name Ion Barbu). I used Google Translate :) (and some pondering) to turn one of his most famous poems into English.

The literary authority claims that the poem is about the poetic art, while a mathematician would think it is about a Fourier transform (noncommutative, see the "groups of water", SL(2)?).

Here is the translation of the poem Ion Barbu, Din ceas dedus:

From the clock, down the depth of this calm peak,

Passed through the mirror into blessed azure,

Tailoring on the crushing of the aggressive herds

In groups of water a second, purer game.

Latent nadir! The poet raises the sum

Of spreading harps lost into reversed flight.

The song exhausts: as deep as the sea bears

Its jellies, from under the green bells.

I agree with the point you're trying to make, but perhaps doctors aren't the best representatives of the scientific establishment. Medical practice today is still as much art as science. There is a significant amount of underlying science but many areas are still poorly understood. So doctors rely heavily on customs, guesswork, and intuition in areas where no reliable scientific data exists.

And the situation in medicine is exposed to additional confounding factors - the placebo effect exists (for both faith healers and doctors) and (at least for doctors) has been getting stronger: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-gr...

So the effect of the ritual of seeing the doctor and undergoing treatment has increased in strength, possibly as people have grown to trust doctors more.

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