>Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer.
I disagree. I am a psychiatrist and participated in some clinical research. Step 0 is quantifying. It's not always perfect, but if you don't know what you are measuring, your measurements are useless.
The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be:
a) missing other relevant metrics
b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm
The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man.
If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.
But there's a bar graph! What more could you possibly ask for? Units? Definitions? Those just add visual clutter and make the bar graph less pretty. Beauty is truth, after all.
Comments
>Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer.
I disagree. I am a psychiatrist and participated in some clinical research. Step 0 is quantifying. It's not always perfect, but if you don't know what you are measuring, your measurements are useless.
The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be: a) missing other relevant metrics b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm
The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man.
If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.
But there's a bar graph! What more could you possibly ask for? Units? Definitions? Those just add visual clutter and make the bar graph less pretty. Beauty is truth, after all.