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I'm not entirely sure how to do this, but I think it would benefit society to have Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus taught, and probably William James's Pragmatism.

Wittgenstein is a difficult read, Pragmatism is not difficult, but I feel like many people wouldn't understand what is being said.

The goal of this would be to teach how language is the basis for all science, and as a result cannot explain what is realistically happening, but rather a useful estimation.

But right now, the majority of the population believes in scientific realism and have no idea that biology/medicine are systems with rough edges that cannot understand everything.

I imagine the humility for doctors would be a benefit. The general population would be more likely to work towards developing solutions and trying things rather than expecting a simple solution.

But again, I have no idea how to actually do this. It took almost a decade of reading to learn about these concepts, and it took humanity ~2400 years since Plato to figure this out.

discuss

PaulKeeble|6 months ago

The problem goes quite a bit deeper than that in medicine. Most descriptions of diseases have been reduced to a primary set of symptoms and presentations. Just this week we had a study showing MS patients start turning up in doctors offices 15 years before the accepted MS symptom set appears and its taken this long to notice. Worse is the set of symptoms that are part of the disease is badly truncated.

This happens in every single disease, ME/CFS is 280 symptoms yet its defined by 4 despite the fact that only seems to match about 90% of the patients but they have other combinations. We are dealing with both the imprecise nature of language and a lack of common experience with which to convey understanding but also a medical system that has drastically simplified diseases to the point where its descriptions and diagnostics are incomplete. Its going to take a very long time to correct it all assuming we can get medicine to once again follow the scientific findings, which remains a big if at this point.