Hacker News Reader

It worked for Steve Jobs!

Jobs didn’t do this part correctly:

“try to understand the issues yourself”

Your contractor is a skilled professional, not a drone. You need to exercise good judgment if you’re going to make decisions.

That's my point: are you sure you understand the issue better than your doctor, who has over a decade of training? In most cases, it's easier to find a good doctor than to learn enough to outguess your bad one. Devote your efforts to learning to select the doctor.

You need to be informed to know which doctor is better. I generally try to follow the advice of my family doctor, but that’s because I’ve made an informed decision on past experiences where I double checked him.

But that’s easy with a doctor you have a long term relationship with. I imagine it’s different eg. if you get cancer it’s probably going to just be a part time job to keep informed on all the doctor’s recommendations, and getting second opinions sounds like it would be time prohibitive. I don’t know of an easy way around this though.

You don't need to be informed because the beauty of second opinions is that you have a statistical advantage. Meaning, if one dude is telling you something, he could be wrong. If two are... well you might want to listen. 3? 4? What are the odds they're all idiots?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com