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Comment by evv | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives that drive it are wrong. Especially with medical science.

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You say that like "Science" is a thing. It's not. There is no platonic "science" that exists independently of the human institutions actually doing science. To imagine there is is to make science into a religion.

That's because you're unfortunately incorrect. There is a thing called capital-s Science, distinct from lowercase-s science. The former is a religion, just like you said, and the latter is merely an updating empirical process. The former is what Scott Adams and most other people discussing the article are talking about, and the latter is, hundreds of years later, so banal that it doesn't merit discussion.

"Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives that drive it are wrong."

Which sounds pretty similar to "science is broken", from an outsider's perspective.

Personally I think medical science and the health care industry are so broken that they should just be rebooted from scratch.

What does that even mean?

It means someone could in theory create a vertically integrated alternative to the entire field of medicine rebooted from the ground up with more modern understandings of things like statistics (e.g. Bayesianism) and more efficient bureaucratic constructs, and it'd probably be considerably better than what we have.

I say in theory because this would cost a rather large fortune and would probably be illegal in most nations, so it's not likely to actually happen.

Well you gotta pinch your doctors nose while inserting a paper clip in his ear and wait thirty seconds. Factory reboot

It means doctors no longer have to wash their hands prior to a trepanning.

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