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.
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.