Study: Doctors diagnostic judgements are "mathematically incoherent", "ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect"

Just wait until they get to Fisher's Test....

One of the go-to manipulations favored by capricious public health officials and canonized medical experts in their unceasing efforts to convince recalcitrant skeptics to get vaccinated is “discuss vaccination with your physician”.

The logic of this would seem to be pretty obvious and intuitive… but is it really?

I think we can agree that most doctors have real medical expertise, at least in the specific disciplines where they practice. So they would be equipped to advise regarding likely medical consequences if you do “A” or avoid “B” or how to treat condition “X”.

But as it turns out, when it comes to diagnosing and weighing treatment options, there is another discipline that is sometimes just as important as technical medical knowledge: probability & statistics. Why? Because oftentimes, diagnosis and/or treatment isn’t straightforward but instead involves different risks that have different odds based on different factors.

This is especially true when it comes to novel biological products, where we don’t have widespread clinical experience using it, and instead must rely upon the statistical data generated by pre-marketing trials and post-marketing surveillance.

Like the genetic covid vaccine pharmaceuticals.

Which brings us to our central question:

Do doctors understand statistics and data enough - even in theory - to have a credible expert opinion regarding the risk/benefits of the covid vaccines??

Thanks to the abundant grace and benevolence of SCIENCE, we have been endowed with the answer to this profound theological interrogitum.

JAMA - yes, the one that is possibly the top medical journal in the world - just published a study “Analysis of Physicians’ Probability Estimates of a Medical Outcome Based on a Sequence of Events”, where they attempted to determine the statistical proficiency of doctors.

Well, that might be overstating their goal. They weren’t trying to see if the docs can do fancy Greek hieroglyphic statistical math. Rather, this seemed more along the lines of “is your doctor smarter than a fifth grader”, or as they succinctly articulated in their own words:

Objective  To ascertain whether physicians are able to correctly estimate the overall probability of a medical outcome resulting from 2 independent events.

Not exactly hyperbolic geometry (yes, that’s an actual thing).

This is closer to 1+1 than it is to the quadratic equation. Much closer. Let’s take a look.

So, what was the mathematical challenge that proved insurmountable for 78% of doctors?

Findings  In this survey study of 215 physicians, most respondents (78.1%) estimated the probability of a medical outcome resulting from a 2-step sequence to be greater than the probability of at least 1 of the 2 component events, a result that was mathematically incoherent (ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect).

In plain English, the math ‘challenge’ was as follows:

If a treatment requires A & B to both happen, and the probability of A = 80%, and the probability of B is 70%, what is the probability for the treatment to be successful?

Any rational half-witted sentient fifth grader would know that the absolute highest possible probability of both A&B happening is 70%. (The probability can actually be 70% under the right conditions. Just not more than 70%.)

Not doctors though. Or to be mathematically precise, not 78.1% of the doctors in the study, who were hopelessly befuddled by what is apparently to them the most vexing intellectual penumbra after the rumpus enigma of the precise number of human genders that will ever exist.

**78% of doctors gave an answer that was higher than 70%**

(Well, they gave the equivalent of that, my illustration was just random made up numbers.)

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

Remember, this does not meant that the other 21.9% of doctors are math savants, just that they did not make the logically impossible step that an outcome can be more likely to happen than it’s constituent steps individually.

And then they wonder why we don’t trust the experts????? As Biden is wont to randomly but passionately exclaim, “C’mon man!!”

At a minimum then, we can all agree, the last person you ought to consult with about the risk/benefit analysis of covid vaccines is your local doctor. After all, this was published in the primary encyclical of SCIENCE itself, so this proposition is by definition imbued with Fauci’s Divine Infallibility.

This also offers a potential explanation for why doctors are so readily fooled by obviously absurd pronouncements from health authorities, or why doctors cannot be convinced by reams of data showing higher case rates in vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people. When formal structured logic is not a condition for deductive reasoning, that really opens up the range of possible interpretations of phenomena that would otherwise prove to be insurmountable refutations of your prejudicially favored hypotheses.

As the study’s authors very underwhelmingly conclude (emphasis added):

Conclusions and Relevance  In this survey study of 215 physicians, respondents consistently overestimated the combined probability of 2 events compared with the probability calculated from their own estimates of the individual events.

This biased estimation, consistent with the conjunction fallacy, may have substantial implications for diagnostic and prognostic decision-making.

Ya think??