Comment by AdamHominem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamHominem | Hacker News Reader

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But if an expert in fasteners says "use this nail/bolt, made of this material and grade, for this application"...and then Joe Roofer says "WELL I actually work on roofs unlike those ivory tower mechanical and structural engineers, I'll use what I think is best" and then years later a couple people get killed...

There are a lot of infamous incidents caused by people thinking they know better than the people who designed stuff and actually had training, experience, and education in that field. Doing things like changing fastener grades, or styles, or completely changing how something is put together. The most ready example I can think of is the hotel bridge collapse that killed a couple dozen people, because some mouth-breather thought he knew better than the structural engineers that drew up plans on how to anchor the bridge to its overhead supports.

Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines, and the people who do are people I don't want anywhere near patient care because they're going to second-guess other experts, like the doctors they work with, the instructions for equipment and drugs, etc.

> Virtually nobody at a hospital is qualified to second-guess vaccines

...and the people in the hospital are also in a great position to verify that (1) vaccines work.

Let P(H|V) be the probability that had outcome H happens if you are vaccinated, and let P(H|~V) be the probability of that had outcome when you are not vaccinated.

Then P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = P(~V) / P(V) x P(V|H) / P(~V|H)

where P(V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was vaccinated, and P(~V|H) is the probability that someone with outcome H was not vaccinated.

All they need to do is look at their patients that have outcome H (such as being hospitalized, or dying) and count how many were vaccinated and how many were not, find out the vaccination rate of the community their patients came from, and they can calculate P(H|V) / P(H|~V) which is how much vaccination reduces your chances of H.

For example, if 70% of the people in your community are vaccinated, and you have 50 people who died from COVID in the last month, 5 vaccinated and 45 not vaccinated, you'd get that P(H|V) / P(H|~V) = 0.048. Vaccination is reducing a person's chances of dying by 95%.

So even if they don't want to just trust the experts they can see for themselves that the experts are telling the truth.

Or for people who want their math in pie chart form

https://twitter.com/simondotau/status/1444537141413888003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Bridge#First_design_and...

Would you listen to an expert doctor who didn't wash his hands before childbirth or a old wive's tail midwife? BEcause this is an actual life and death scenario, and history doesn't look well on the 'experts'.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639...

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