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There’s nothing to disagree here: the *fact* is a lot of pills in medicine are already causally evaluated without knowledge of their chemical and biological effects (=mechanisms) That being said, medicine can do that thanks to double blinded trials @ethanbdm/1214941654437826561Permalink
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W/o double blinded trials, I am not sure it would be that easy What I’m saying is: - in theory, you don’t necessarily need to know the mechanisms to establish causality - but you probably need the right methodology to do that with a high enough confidence levelPermalink
Mood +3 🙂
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Without something as methodologically clean as double blinded trials, I guess it’s not impossible but just harder, and maybe the increased difficulty is high enough to switch to a different regime where you need some knowledge of the mechanisms to direct your investigationPermalink
Mood +3 🙂
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Symmetrically though, knowing the mechanisms can sometimes allow to rule out a causality, or at least assess this causality is very unlikely For instance with homeopathy, that is based on outdated principles we know are not true (like the memory of water)Permalink
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But even in this case, you still need to do some empirical confirmation because maybe homeopathy is working but for completely different reasons (spoiler: homeopathy still doesn’t work)
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That was my 5 cents on this fascinating discussion There’s also a lot to discuss on what a "mechanism" really is, but I’m hungry and I’m going to eat breakfastPermalink
Mood +3 🙂