sci.med:556795 14 Aug 2016

I have come to realise that what keeps science from spurious results is a priori encyclopedic knowledge. Two Anecdotes. When my dad was diagnosed with stomach cancer, I was told it was caused by nitrates in cold cuts. But when
the cancer came back, as the Viagra Nobel showed nitric oxide to be the primordial mammalian neurotransmitter, I was told the 1930s theory of Helicobacter Pylori had been revived. In grand rounds a year ago, a young resident presented a case of an 89 yr old with enlarged heart as genetic,
only to have an older doctor insist it was caused by 60 yrs of high blood pressure. I asked someone at the genome center and he said adding Bayesian priors to expert systems reduces spurious results. Bayes Law brought Kant's concept of a priori to mathematical probability. I have always felt uncomfortable with this concept of evidence based medicine precisely because every few years a totally new theory throws out all previous knowledge and makes new claims. Instead it pays to see why the old theory was wrong and to learn from our mistakes, not totally dismiss them. This really extends from
the Hun or German peerless (hence uninspectable) hyperspecialist model of education which now seems to overtake the anglohellenistic model of peer reviewed encyclopedic (encyclios paideia) general education championed by Barzun. The peerless hyperspecialist might as well be a shaman or guru shrouded in mystery. I accept the errors of those who rejected Galileo, although you could argue they weren't based on scientific study but blind ideology, hence a different type of problem. I view ideology as the worship
of human hueristics and the cause of atrocity when the heuristics take precedence to reality. I believe Burke's central thesis, that change should
be measured and studied because if we replace everything at once, we will
have nothing to stand on, or pulling the wrong thread could unravel the
fabric. Further, as Sydney Hook warned, studying our old errors (or claptrap) keeps us from repeating them. Before "Japanese Innovation" we were taught
that we should follow standards so we could continue to use old results, algorithms and equipment. As an example I learned electronic devices should
be designed to handle (fan out) five accessories, but the modern ones reduced it the the bare minimum of one. Everything is now designed to only work in
the short run, as if Keynes admonitions "In the long run, we are all dead"
has been extended to science and engineering.


- = -
Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist
http://www.panix.com/~vjp2/vasos.htm
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