I’ve spent fifteen years not responding to [Hanson’s medicine] argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat

Response to Scott Alexander on Medical Effectiveness

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2024-04-28 05:00:03

I’ve spent fifteen years not responding to [Hanson’s medicine] argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat up on one contrarian who nobody else listens to. But I recently learned Bryan Caplan also takes this seriously. Beating up on two contrarians who nobody else listens to is a great use of a platform!

Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work. This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work.

Scott then quotes 500 words from a 2022 post of mine, none of which have me saying all medicine is useless on all margins. Even so, he repeats this claim several times in his post. If Scott had doubts, he could have asked me. Or, consulted our 2016 book The Elephant in the Brain (52K copies sold; I’m sure he knows of it):

Our ancestors had reasons to value medicine apart from its therapeutic benefits. But medicine today is different in one crucial regard: it’s often very effective. Vaccines prevent dozens of deadly diseases. Emergency medicine routinely saves people from situations that would have killed them in the past. Obstetricians and advanced neonatal care save countless infants and mothers from the otherwise dangerous activity of childbirth. The list goes on. …