Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Medicine is a field subject to an incentive landscape that can, among other issues, encourage pathological risk aversion in treatment and research, which holds back patients getting the care with the greatest expected value to them and limits our ability as a society to adapt to new and changing health issues such as global pandemics. Medical professionals are often trained in a narrow set of epistemic norms that lead to slow updates on new evidence, overreliance on individual decisionmaking, and difficulty communicating about complex tradeoffs. The unavoidable closeness to moral and ethical issues, as well as difficulties in reasoning about decisions that hold lives directly in the balance, exacerbate the problem.
We’re interested in projects that address these problems, perhaps including the following: - Literature and media that promotes truth-seeking and expected-value-thinking norms in medicine, whether explicit in non-fiction or training material, or in fictional settings - Resources that seek to aggregate medical evidence relevant to a specific condition or clinical application, and attempts to normalize bringing up such a resource to your medical provider - Efforts to open-source medical metadata, particularly with regard to outcomes of different treatment plans, and to precisely relax certain regulations that prevent this data from being collected - Increasing incentives for the reporting of null results, unconventional results, and meta-analyses of existing medical studies. Establishment of specific prizes for meta-analysis studies, and literature that communicates neutral and evidence-based research effectively at a layperson’s level
It could help change the existing academic culture of overly-restrictive “bioethics” around public health issues like pandemics to think more rationally about when to approve things like rapid tests and vaccines, when to impose mandates and travel bans versus not, etc.
It might lead to broader reforms and readjustments of focus, leading to a faster pace of developing medicines (ultimately saving many QALYs), reductions in healthcare cost, more progress in understanding aging, etc.
One reason not to focus on this intervention is if you thought that general epistemology-improving efforts across academia would work well, and there’s no particular reason to target medicine/bioethics/etc first.
Towards Better Epistemology in Medicine
Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Medicine is a field subject to an incentive landscape that can, among other issues, encourage pathological risk aversion in treatment and research, which holds back patients getting the care
with the greatest expected value to them and limits our ability as a society to adapt
to new and changing health issues such as global pandemics. Medical professionals are often trained in a narrow set of epistemic norms that lead to slow updates on new evidence, overreliance on individual decisionmaking, and difficulty communicating about complex tradeoffs. The unavoidable closeness to moral and ethical issues, as well as difficulties in reasoning about decisions that hold lives directly in the balance, exacerbate the problem.
We’re interested in projects that address these problems, perhaps including the following:
- Literature and media that promotes truth-seeking and expected-value-thinking norms
in medicine, whether explicit in non-fiction or training material, or in fictional settings
- Resources that seek to aggregate medical evidence relevant to a specific condition or
clinical application, and attempts to normalize bringing up such a resource to your
medical provider
- Efforts to open-source medical metadata, particularly with regard to outcomes of different
treatment plans, and to precisely relax certain regulations that prevent this data from being collected
- Increasing incentives for the reporting of null results, unconventional results, and meta-analyses of existing medical studies. Establishment of specific prizes for meta-analysis studies, and literature that communicates neutral and evidence-based research effectively at a layperson’s level
I think this is quite important insofar as:
It could help change the existing academic culture of overly-restrictive “bioethics” around public health issues like pandemics to think more rationally about when to approve things like rapid tests and vaccines, when to impose mandates and travel bans versus not, etc.
It might lead to broader reforms and readjustments of focus, leading to a faster pace of developing medicines (ultimately saving many QALYs), reductions in healthcare cost, more progress in understanding aging, etc.
One reason not to focus on this intervention is if you thought that general epistemology-improving efforts across academia would work well, and there’s no particular reason to target medicine/bioethics/etc first.