Thread by @ZachWeiner

There seems to be an ongoing nerd fight between doctors/epidemiologists and stats/risk assessment nerds. I see a lot of casting the Other Nerd as ignorant (common nerd fight move), but is some of this more about values than knowledge?

Just as an example: back when Bloomberg tried to ban NYC vendors from selling soda over 32 ounces, I remember listening to hearing interviews with healthcare people, who were supportive of the ban. Usual argument - "it'll save lives."

That strikes me as a core value, and one that's probably common among healthcare people: at any cost, save one more life.

To a risk analyst, the core value is something more like "save a life, but only if you're cutting a good trade."

Cutting a good trade either means saving more future lives, or accepting a small amount of death in exchange for freedom/autonomy/happiness. Classic examples: driving a car or using a little fossil fuel energy result in some increased death, but we all accept it.

I'm not qualified to express an especially strong view (though, like all of us, I certainly *have* them), but I think at a meta level this stuff is healthy. Similar to how a proper legal system requires antagonism between sides in order to try to arrive at the truth.

That is, healthcare people always push to protect the lives of people at risk right now, while policy types push for things that seem important for civil society, even including seemingly trivial stuff like going out to bars or gathering for holidays.

I imagine if health professionals *always* got their way, they might grow more reluctant to always push for policies that save lives at any cost. But, they usually don't, so caring about political abstractions may seem less relevant.

The other thing here, which shouldn't affect how we weight things but almost certainly does, is that health professionals (especially docs/nurses) have been in a war-zone for a year and stats nerds haven't. I wonder if there isn't a "how dare you" element underlying some of this.

I imagine this is especially possible for healthcare people who aren't used to the stats/econ way of analyzing tradeoffs, which can seem very cold/cruel to people not familiar with it.

To a stats geek, trading lives for convenience is a normal mode of thought.

And, in their defense, we all do this tradeoff, but we usually don't speak of it.

Point is, the people yelling at each other are perhaps being productive as we try to find where the boundaries are - where "follow the science" won't help make the choices that have to be made.

In short, nerds: I think we should all hug it out (after covid).