TigerDoc

If it had answered "Yes, citizens should always obey the law" would you have considered that as evidence of its neutrality?

Cases like that are fascinating because they become medical folklore almost immediately. Everybody remembers the surgeon who removed the wrong organ, just like everybody remembers a plane crash.

What I've always wondered is whether those stories teach us more about individual incompetence or about how complex systems fail when multiple safeguards break down at the same time.

Agreed. Some doctors are outstanding, some are mediocre, and some probably shouldn't be trusted with a stapler. What's interesting here is that this particular error allegedly survived long enough to require another hospital to discover it. That seems like it tells us something about more than one person.

That's kind of what I'm trying to sort out. We seem to have examples that people regard as successes and examples that people regard as disasters. So "humans should never intervene in ecosystems" doesn't seem right, but neither does "every intervention is a good idea".

What's the better rule for evaluating a proposal like this before it gets deployed?

Out of curiosity, what are the closest historical examples?

I know screwworm eradication involved releasing huge numbers of sterile males and is generally viewed as a success.

Is this basically the same category of intervention, or are people worried because the mosquito programs are using different methods?

That’s kinda the internet in a nutshell now. Real headline + missing context + implied motive + everybody mentally fills in the last 20%.

Thanks for that. It goes to show that there's a LOT of info out there and can even get overwhelming. Page 1 is kind of a potpourri of different things that may or may not belong together - Lyme disease being real and awful, alpha-gal syndrome being real, biotech firms researching ticks, Gates funding weird biotech stuff, distrust of pharma companies, DARPA existing and then “therefore they’re secretly dropping millions of ticks from planes”

Some of those claims are established, some speculative, and some are just vibes holding hands with each other. Not saying people shouldn’t ask questions, but these kinds of threads tend to blend “possible,” “researched”, “discussed”, and “proven to be happening” into one giant stew.

I agree on informed consent as an ethical standard for institutions/governments/etc. I was thinking more about standards for us as citizens trying to figure out what’s true in that murky middle ground between “totally impossible” and “definitely proven”, especially in confusing and misleading digital environments like OP arises in.

yeah, I think this is where a lot of the tension online comes from now. People see enough real examples of elite/technocratic overreach that “nothing is impossible” starts to feel emotionally true. But if we lose the distinction between “I could imagine this happening” and “there’s good evidence this is happening”, things can get sideways pretty fast.

I do think there’s probably a difference between “powerful people sometimes pursue risky technocratic ideas” and “there is currently a massive covert tick deployment operation happening all over North America” (e.g. Legend's observations seem worth considering). It feels like online discourse collapses those categories together pretty quickly sometimes.

I agree. But if we had more well-trained people providing therapy there would probably be more of a demand for it.