To eror is human--but not humane!

Cognitive biases that lead to diagnostic erors (oops):

"Anchoring bias; availability bias; confirmation bias; diagnosis momentum; overconfidence bias; premature closure; search-satisfying bias."

It's obviously only by grace that anything gets done in medicine or science at all! Yet the last thing we will acknowledge in these fields is Grace and Mercy! There are salient exceptions, such as the editor of the Journal of the AMA, as I mentioned in the past. Yet her brief acknowledgment may even so be cultural lip service, or a concession to Muslim physicians.

But Flannery was generally correct, even about the 1950's, that the majority settle for "practical atheism" and that "nihilism is the very air we breathe now." (my paraphrase--was she a canary down the gemeinschaft?)

Will computerrors solve our problems with medical errors? Not so long as they are the manufacture of men! If anything they have compounded the problem by the surfeit of more information than we can even sort out, much less handle in any practical sense. Medicine in particular and in practice is in a great reverse; we are using and being compelled to use drugs that are relatively ancient, because they are cheap and because of the current debunking juggernaut/political bias against newer drugs. The new bottom line: if it's new and expensive, it's gotta go. In this case the tail of politics is definitely wagging the dog of science and medicine--which may be nothing new. At bottom, science and medicine are largely products of culture(s) and their goals are almost always those that the given and current social mileu dictates. No where is this more evident that in hospital boardrooms!!!

Time magazine recently paraded out Stephen Hawking who reasserted his basic atheism; one writer's critique was published: "As I see it, the only handicap Hawking has is his inability to recognize a personal God who created the universe. Someone needs to nudge Mr. Hawking on the shoulder and tell him that the realm of God likely begins where physics ends. Trying to explain God's existence from within the confines of physics reminds me of the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This brings to mind all the inevitable biases noted above, esp. overconfidence bias and premature closure.

Not that I am fond of the God-of-the-Gaps theory ( or any gap theory for that matter) nor would I rely on such an argument from ignorance, in spite of human ignorance being a true and blatant abyss, which is also relatively devoid of much sense of wonder or thankfulness. Thanklessness and the narcissism from which it springs is not only a universal human bias, it is also frequently a disease that affects adversely every human body part.

The problem with "proving" God's existence is that although there is both a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis to this most basic of all questions, there is no conceivable experimental protocol for something above science from within the small world of pure science.(assuming there is such purity/holiness of science, which is patently doubtful but often used to get grants) Once again, this is not a subsumable entity we are talking about, so when one assumes that the God v no God hypothesis can turn from theory to proven fact,which is stridently trumpeted from the academy, one has to proceed from a huge bias towards materialism--which is precisely what we see in Hawking and Dawkins.

They rule out God by assumption no matter where the data leads. So the "design" hypothesis means absolutely nothing to them, axiomatically and automatically. Once again we see human will and subrational choices--with some attempt to disguise them by PR and shouting loudly on both sides--in the fore, supported by pro and con sensate reactions to current perceptions and biases; but lacking any unspurious methodology.

TNY has an article just out on the problems of experimental science--will comment later