Gerry- I know this is from a while back, but your capitalized “Public,” is such important and necessary distinction. It takes thoughtfulness further. Into places where medicine can really heal. Great read.
Great article, thanks! It reminds me of a podcast episode I listened to today on the New Yorker podcast with RFK as the guest. He bragged about how much he knows about science as a trial lawyer. I think a lot of the public misconception and apparently legal misconception is that statements in science are usually made based on the best available evidence at the time, and going back in hindsight, with new evidence to say someone was lying or as RFK has accused Fauci specifically of worse… is just not ok.
I don’t think it’s possible for us to completely escape the human brain’s discomfort with uncertainty and need for black and white answers. But Understanding the tension can help to dispel reactionary anger perhaps! Sorry if this is rambling, I’m dictating as i grill, thanks again for the article
Before I retired (and came wandering back toward medicine) I was involved in a probablistic weather forecasting project for severe weather warnings based on computer models. We referred to the process as ensemble modeling, and had some really great discussions about how we'd evaluate the various model results to come up with probabilistic values for said severe weather.
Imagine you're working with a single model, but with 36 versions of it that are minor tweaks in how the physics works. Now, imagine that some of the results are strongly divergent from the mean, while others are less strongly divergent. If you're the general public, you'd likely assume the model mean, or, the model consensus (what the majority are indicating) is the best solution. That said, it's usually not the best, but actually the worst representation of what the environment is likely to produce (unless ALL the models converge; then we're concerned for the rise of the machines) because it smooths out all the outliers, and severe weather, by definition, is a fringe condition.
Now, try explaining this to the general public. Or, for that matter, TV meteorologists who've not seen a model since college, if then. The uncertainty element is not intuitively obvious and may truly be counterintuitive.
The same problem exists here. People want, as you note, simple binary answers, and medicine, and human pathophysiology are rarely binary. Having spent time with both the weather problem AND the medical and public health problem, I'm often an emotional wreck trying to express the uncertainty terms in a manner "normal humans" are willing and able to accept.
Hope the grilling went well. We did impulse pizza instead of braving the intermittent showers to grill, but I've got some sausages that are crying to go get some smoke.
Gerry- I know this is from a while back, but your capitalized “Public,” is such important and necessary distinction. It takes thoughtfulness further. Into places where medicine can really heal. Great read.
Great article, thanks! It reminds me of a podcast episode I listened to today on the New Yorker podcast with RFK as the guest. He bragged about how much he knows about science as a trial lawyer. I think a lot of the public misconception and apparently legal misconception is that statements in science are usually made based on the best available evidence at the time, and going back in hindsight, with new evidence to say someone was lying or as RFK has accused Fauci specifically of worse… is just not ok.
I don’t think it’s possible for us to completely escape the human brain’s discomfort with uncertainty and need for black and white answers. But Understanding the tension can help to dispel reactionary anger perhaps! Sorry if this is rambling, I’m dictating as i grill, thanks again for the article
Before I retired (and came wandering back toward medicine) I was involved in a probablistic weather forecasting project for severe weather warnings based on computer models. We referred to the process as ensemble modeling, and had some really great discussions about how we'd evaluate the various model results to come up with probabilistic values for said severe weather.
Imagine you're working with a single model, but with 36 versions of it that are minor tweaks in how the physics works. Now, imagine that some of the results are strongly divergent from the mean, while others are less strongly divergent. If you're the general public, you'd likely assume the model mean, or, the model consensus (what the majority are indicating) is the best solution. That said, it's usually not the best, but actually the worst representation of what the environment is likely to produce (unless ALL the models converge; then we're concerned for the rise of the machines) because it smooths out all the outliers, and severe weather, by definition, is a fringe condition.
Now, try explaining this to the general public. Or, for that matter, TV meteorologists who've not seen a model since college, if then. The uncertainty element is not intuitively obvious and may truly be counterintuitive.
The same problem exists here. People want, as you note, simple binary answers, and medicine, and human pathophysiology are rarely binary. Having spent time with both the weather problem AND the medical and public health problem, I'm often an emotional wreck trying to express the uncertainty terms in a manner "normal humans" are willing and able to accept.
Hope the grilling went well. We did impulse pizza instead of braving the intermittent showers to grill, but I've got some sausages that are crying to go get some smoke.
Didn't realize you were publishing! (your previous pieces must have got lost in the sea of notifications I get from Substack).
I've been writing intermittently. I'm going to try to pick up the pace a little.