Pascalian medicine
Article
Pascalian medicine is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 24, 2021 and February 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Does Pascalian medicine beat our current strategy”; “I try to respond in Pascalian Medicine”. It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, COVID, hydroxychloroquine.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 24, 2021
- Last seen: February 01, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Alexandros Marinos (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- hydroxychloroquine (2 shared issues)
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- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
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- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
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- ivmmeta (2 shared issues)
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- ivmmeta.com (2 shared issues)
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- Omura’s Wager (2 shared issues)
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- Pascal’s Wager (2 shared issues)
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- 2006 Ioannidis paper (1 shared issues)
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- ACTIV-6 (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandros (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Even if Pascalian medicine is an individually reasonable choice, might it be bad at the level of society? No individual drug or supplement we’ve talked about so far costs very much money. But giving twenty inexpensive things to everyone with every disease quickly becomes expensive. On the other hand, the US medical system gave up on caring about costs long ago, and it’s not clear this would cost any more than eg Aduhelm or several other bad decisions we’ve already made.
Inline links: Aduhelm
Still, if this is true, you might conclude that it just means doctors shouldn’t universally recommend Pascalian medicine. It could still be rational to set up a course of it on your own.
There’s a potential compromise solution, where smart doctors come up with Pascalian medicine protocols for the few patients who would actually want them. But this would be a weird enough thing for a doctor to do that it would run into the “I wouldn’t trust any club that would accept me as a member” problem.
This isn’t how mainstream medicine thinks about this in any other context, and if true it’s much more interesting than a debate around one particular repurposed dewormer. I try to respond in Pascalian Medicine. But since then, there’s been more evidence that ivermectin at the doses used in COVID studies might be harmful. Both the I-TECH study and Dr. Bitterman’s analysis found more severe side effects in ivermectin groups compared to placebo. Not only does this challenge ivermectin in particular, but using it as a test case calls Omura’s Wager into question more generally.