We generally think we ourselves are the best judges of our choices in drink, food, and medical practitioners. Yet, there is a sizeable amount of evidence we couldn't tell a mouse from an elephant.
Consumers Reports once tested a large sample of coffee drinkers to identify the better quality coffees. It turned out, about a third of the sampled persons could not tell instant from brewed coffee, and another third could not identify them with certainty. Research on the taste differences in wines resulted in similar findings. My own very informal tests have shown most persons can't tell one whiskey from another, no matter what the price. I also doubt many can tell the difference between brands of vodka by taste or smell, and probably would not be able to tell vodka from gin.
A recent survey of British taste buds by the Tropicana Food company revealed that 70 percent of Britons can't identify the flavor of mashed carrot, 40 percent couldn't distinguish cooked apples, 32 percent couldn't tell cooked pears, and 20 percent can't even identify a mashed potato. "The blindfold tests show that consumers have real difficulty in defining taste and become confused in identifying food types when they cannot see what they are eating or drinking," a Tropicana spokeswoman concluded. (Reuter)
Hilary Clinton's proposals for national health care were heavily criticized because they "would have put limits on people's choice of doctors"; or at least 69 percent of respondents to a survey thought so. (Newsweek, 27-28 October 1994). The proposals in fact did not have such limits. Freedom to choose your own medical practitioner, whether conventional or quack, remains one of the big obstacles to achieving national health insurance. Yet, with the best will in the world, do you have the information to make a choice?
The most recent issue of Consumers Reports (Nov. 1996, pp. 62-63) reviews what knowledge you can acquire about your prospective practitioner. You can find out his credentials, degrees, specialties, and board certification. With some effort and cost you may also find out if he has been disciplined by the state AMA, but not whether charges have been filed. It extremely difficult to determine if a doctor has been sued for malpractice, or how that turned out, and whether it was frivolous. But, most of all there is no way to know if a doctor is trustworthy, skillful, capable or up to date on his learning. Fundamentally then, the free market place in medicine leaves us blind choice.
Isidor I. Rabi's is an American tale in the tradition of unlikelihood mixed with seeming inevitability. Brought as an infant from Galicia, Rabi grew up on the lower East Side of New York City, and, later, in Brooklyn, on one side hemmed in by poverty, but expanding on the other into the culture and religion of Orthodox Judaism. His special gift of clear and captivating speech was evident early. Though always small of stature, he made it on the tough slum streets by fascinating the bully-boys with Bible stories.
The local public library was his refuge, a place for his self-education but eventually the cause of a familiar crisis. A little book on astronomy opened his eyes to the Copernican solar system with its clockwork regularity of planetary motion. The simplicity and beauty were overwhelming, scuttling his biblically-based belief that the sun's risings and settings are caused by God's constant operations. Young Rabi announced to his pious, long-suffering parents: "It's all very simple: who needs God?" He was evidently one of those fiercely independent kids: when time came for his bar mitzvah, it was held, at his insistence, in his home instead of the synagogue, and he delivered a speech on "How the Electric Light Works." Yet all his life he remained God-struck, rather like Einstein, who called himself an irreligious believer.
from: Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and other Passions, p. 229 Isidor Isaac Rabi [1898-1988] physicist, received the Nobel Prize in 1944.
"Folks don't mind if you tell them a few lies, as long as you are real sincere about it." --bio-astrologer Esmeralda von Löwenzahn-Dentdelion
Skeptics have questioned Esmeralda's assertion that psychics could possibly be so ethical as never to enrich themselves from predictions on the stock market and on games of chance. But Esmeralda points out that few psychics are rich, which surely and clearly shows they do not enrich themselves from their predictions. They would be dishonest charlatans if they did so.
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