I have spotted this totalitarian streak among some of my friends who went to med school. We should ban smoking, force everyone to do this or that. As bad as they can be, we're probably better off with lawyers in charge.
Doctors aren't really scientists, although some might think so -- they're taught the results of scientific research, and how to apply that to diagnose and treat patients. There's a reason that "evidence-based medicine" isn't just called "medicine". Most of it is pattern-matching on learned knowledge. The result is that some of this knowledge becomes outdated as the underlying body of scientific knowledge evolves, which may cause problems if the practitioner doesn't keep up with the latest changes in their field.
This probably applies to engineers, too because we use scientific (or logical) results imply certain solutions, and we don't always realise that validity of the underlying assumptions changes over time.
Unless you're actually formulating hypotheses and running experiments, you're probably not a scientist.
I think this is an under-appreciated point. Science is really concerned with inquiry into the world (broadly defined), while doctors and engineers are concerned with improving the world, typically by applying solutions that are based in science to specific problems that have been tasked to them. A lot of the difference isn't apparent even at the undergraduate level, where much of science is presented as true vs. false, rather than as this edifice built on bricks with wildly different levels of epistemic uncertainty that looks quite different to different observers.
The boundaries between these things are pretty fuzzy, though, (even though the cores are distinct) and many doctors and engineers engage in research, while most scientists spend a fair amount of energy on developing tools and techniques, which are often more engineering-type challenges (fortunately we don't practice medicine frequently). Nonetheless, there are often very large discrepancies between the mindsets and approaches of the typical scientist vs. doctor vs. engineer.
I take your point. The semantics to me aren't really that important. Good doctors who have made a lot of observations and read the results of many medical experiments and research are probably pretty qualified people. In a sense when they do "pattern matching" they are performing micro-experiments. They take in synptoms as data, draw out a hypothesis and then treat as an experiment. If the treatment is a success it proves their illness hypothesis.
People die because some idiot parent didn't vaccinated their children, so I say yes, enforce it or don't live in society, go to some isolated island because you are causing harm, it's as totalitarian as allowing people to play Russian roulette with other people's children (actually you'd go to jail so I think we're too lenient with these parents).
On one hand - yes, absolutely, I agree. On the other hand, you remember the outbreak of the swine flu? And some countries wanted to force vaccinations on their citizens? Vaccinations that were later proven to not work at all, because they were prepared for the wrong virus, and some EU countries spent hundreds of millions of euros buying them? How about that - should the government have the power to force you to be vaccinated or not?
your child has more chance of dying by going to the morning bus stop than their child does of dying from not being vaccinated. in fact, i'd bet your child has a better chance of dying by catching the flu from a vaccinated child than some other child not vaccinated by MMR.
i understand if someone doesn't want their child vaccinated and they can't go to public school, but forcing people is another thing, even if it is 'for their own good'.
This is only true in countries where almost every child is vaccinated. In the developing nations, where vaccinations are rare, it's the diseases which kill children, not the cars.
Do you want a gold star because someone on the internet, who said something you didn't agree with on a post, did not publish citations? you failed human.
There are people who cannot be vaccinated (very young, very old, those with immune deficiencies) who rely purely on herd immunity to prevent getting certain illnesses. If all the healthy people who could suffer through the flu opted-out of the vaccine, most of them would get through it just fine, but the illness would pass through the population and kill off a lot of weaker people.
Smoking obviously causes lung cancer via secondhand smoke, but it also leaves a carcinogenic and heavy metal residue on walls and floors (thirdhand smoke). Kids, especially, get sick from this from crawling around the floor. They don't have the luxury of opting-out of smoking.
What are the solutions to these public health problems that aren't heavy-handed? I'm all for freedom and voluntarism but the libertarian solution of identifying the perpetrator and bringing them to civil court falls apart when the vector from perpetrator to victim is so diffuse that you can't trace it back.
Similar problem with people engorging themselves on unhealthy junk. I have no problem when it only affects themselves, but once their obesity-related maladies start costing other people via subsidized healthcare or extra-wide ambulances and whatnot, it's no longer just an individual choice.
We would be better off if nobody smoked, but let's not expand the war on drugs. I'm actually OK with a bit of this kind of totalitarianism, but not when it doesn't actually work.
No, I don't think that if we let the government restrict or influence our actions when it comes to unhealthy habits next thing we know we'll all be living in fascist Italy.
Fascinatingly, if you read Wikipedia's article about fascist Italy [0] Mussolini's rise to power sounds more like something the war-mongerers ("our president is weak") on Fox News would support than what a nanny-state advocate would support.
It is quite surprising that a book written 60 years ago could still seem so timely in describing how well meaning central planning could eventually lead to tyrrany.
Did the trains actually run on time, or did anyone who pointed out that they were late end up with a bullet in the brain? And of course the best way to prevent late arrivals is to minimize the number of trains running.
I'm not sure if it's a culture encouraged at med school, but I certainly have met many a doctor with a mighty god complex. Not that that's exactly rare in the computer science / software engineering world either.
Also, I'm sure we could find people who'd gleefully re-imagine this fantasy story as one where a parent refuses to read the religious tracts being offered to them by a school principal, resulting in the kids being sent to mandatory bible study.
