Does your doctor offer you a medicine and then tell you that it may make your blood pressure go up or it might go down, or , it might stay the same , would your doctor tell you that getting fat will cause slimming. No they don't, so on that level it's a silly argument.
It seem's to try harp on to the old consensus nonsense and I think we can all agree that 100% of people paid to say that global warming is a problem will do so.
I wonder how many educated people stating nonsense does it take before the nonsense is accepted as fact. Cause that seems to be the whole thrust of the argument.
If it were a political issue as to whether to get the surgery, yea I would not be so trusting.
If the doctors had been uncovered saying things like,"I didn't give an interview about how I thought Dr Mann's treatment is wrong because I don't want to do damage to medical science." then I would not go with the majority opinion.
If the doctors said this surgery works, and then no change was detected, I would not trust the surgery.
After the surgery was found to not work, if the doctors persisted in claiming that the surgery works, I would be very skeptical, and look towards other voices.
Lubos Motl argues at length here:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/11/kuperb...
The problem with that argument (i.e. as an analogy) is that for doctors, saying "you need an operation" is very clear. And this is also a grand oversimplification.
A more accurate version of such an analogy would be that doctors recognize that we have a new disease and most feel that it is likely to be a problem in a few decades and should be addressed to varying degrees while one feels it is nothing to worry about at all. They're pretty sure of the cause and have a variety of solutions but they're not sure how effective any particular solution is or how long it will take. Some feel we should start treatment as a precaution. Others say to wait a bit or just do things that make sense for other reasons as well.
For climate scientists, exactly what the 97% are agreeing on is not clear. Nor is it quantified. And it varies in strength of certainty. For example, one answer to this question has this statement: "99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening at a rate never heard of before and humans". I don't recall any consensus surveys asking this question.
Nothing
Like whoever said that, unless I had some special knowledge, "i will go with the majority. maybe you'd trust the one doctor out of 20 who says you do not need an operation."
there is nothing wrong with that argument , if you went to 20 doctors and 19 said you need emergency surgery and one said go take an aspirin and get some rest and you'll be fine would you trust the quack that said you were fine or get the surgery ?
well , when 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening at a rate never heard of before and humans are the cause of this drastic change do you think they're wrong or that the 1% who say no , its fine , we have nothing to worry about and burning coal and oil is not harming the planet ?
I'd trust the 99% who agree over the 1% who are usually working for oil companies and using bad science
The scale of "20 to 1 doctor" is wrong, a comparative numbers would be "32 to 1 doctor" as 97% of climate scientist accept AGW.
This is just an attempt by alarmists to try to show that argument from authority is valid after all.
Asking any scientist about gravity is like asking your family doctor about cancer. Both will know something but neither will be an expert.
Asking a climate scientist about a detailed aspect of climate is like asking your family doctor about that new virus that has just been discovered in Timbuktu. How many proteins, is it helical, will it be harmful to humans, will there be a cure etc.
You will get a good answer about viruses in general but probably nothing about that particular one. Does that make doctors stupid? Of course not - unless they try to pretend that they do know something when they don't - and therein lies the difference, in my humble opinion.
I have done this it was not 20 doctors but somewhere around a dozen including oncolgist's, and I did pick the odd one out, he was a surgeon.
Anyway my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, and the general diagnosis was that she had 3 months left to live, I was not happy with the oncologists I talked to, most of them had a group of other experts and they were advising a combined treatment of immediate surgery, chemotherapy, and treatment to enable a less painful exit.
I was no way happy with this I could see this was an efficient way to bleed all the money I might have and share it amongst their favoured experts.
I finally met this surgeon who said what ever you do don't allow an operation, I will contact my mentor a famous oncologist and we will find which is the best chemotherapy to go for, well we settled on immune type chemotherapy (I forgotten the exact name) and a year later my wife was 95% better a quite amazing result, (during the same time our ex pesident Corazon Aquino was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer and despite have famous surgeons and experts flying in from Switzerland she passed away just over 3 months later)
The medicine for my wife had to be imported from the U.S. and was incredibly expensive, and by this time all my money was gone and I had sold or borrowed everything I could.
My surgeon's famous oncologist then dropped a bombshell on us refusing us anymore drugs ( it's a long painful story that I would rather not go into) suffice to say my wife suffered a setback and eventually passed away after two and a half years, our surgeon stood by and helped enormously right to the very end, even though I could not always pay him.
Well what is the moral of this story, I think it is, do not blindly trust any experts find out and research as much as you can yourself.
My faith in doctors especially oncologists is very low now, I did meet some wonderful people but also a lot of greedy corrupt ones
The informed profession consensus is generally correct. Not always, of course, but it is a good bet.
In the end, you must evaluate the arguments and data on both sides.
Vaccuous has it right, except the 20 doctors are telling you your getting old at an unprecedented rate, it may seem natural to you but you are not an aging specialist and within the next few years you are really going to start aging, just wait and see, unless you make these changes and stop eating meat, and less breathing will help too. You can deny you are aging all you want but 100% of all doctors agree that people are aging.
One of our contributors berated another with this logic in this category.
".i will go with the majority. maybe you'd trust the one doctor out of 20 who says you do not need an operation"
Nothing. Absolute certainty is possible only in the abstract (such as a mathematical proof). When you deal with the real world, you use the best available evidence.
Most doctors would advise you to avoid the disease by changing your behavior if at all possible. Then no operation would be required.
At one point in time, 19 out of 20 doctors recommended bleeding to cure whatever ails you.
Fifteen years before Louis Pasteur established that microorganisms caused disease, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis proposed the same hypothesis. He and his ideas were rejected by the medical establishment at the time. Neither man represented the consensus opinion. In fact, we make advances in science by challenging the current consensus. Look at what Einstein did to Newtonian physics.
4 out of 5 dentists recommend brushing your teeth.
Because it's usually not even one doctor ... it's one person's blog on the internet who may or may not be a doctor.
Actually, the analogy should be 20 doctors with degrees and experience, showing you x-rays, studies, and letting you meet people who undertook the proscribed operation and those who did not .. versus some one guy who flunked high school physics.
Which do you believe?
