I think you're talking about cancer screening rather than the hypothetical in my post. I was not suggesting that no-one should ever get screened for any illness. But it's a balance. Too much screening and testing can be just as harmful as too little - or perhaps even more so. Prostate cancer is actually a classic example of this (see e.g. https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/the-pros-and-cons-...)

Your hypothetical includes every illness and thus, cancer. It is extremely helpful to detect cancer early.

The prostate cancer field is rapidly evolving, and the “controversy” over PSA testing in the US over the last decade is looking like a big mistake. See for example https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/268...

>Your hypothetical includes every illness and thus, cancer.

I think there's a quantifier scope error here. I was saying "you don't want to see everything on the list", i.e. "it's not the case that for all x, you want to see x". You seem to be reading this as "For all x, you don't want to see x". Whatever the right answer is for specific cases (such as prostate cancer), I'm certainly not saying that all testing or screening is pointless.

The paper you link to has a grand total of two citations listed on Google Scholar.

It’s a comment by the chair of the #4 ranked prostate cancer department in the country. Here’s another: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/25...

You changed your statement. What you said was “Do you really want to read through that list? You're better off not worrying about it and enjoying your life.” This unambiguously refers to the list in its entirety.

No, you're still making the quantifier scope error. I'm saying you'd be better off not reading the full list. It doesn't follow from that that you'd be better of without knowing about any of the items of the list. Your mistake is anbalagous to inferring (B) from (A):

(A) John doesn't want to eat the whole pie.

(B) John doesn't want to eat any of the pie.

I'm saying that you're better off not eating the whole pie / reading through the whole list. It doesn't follow from that that you're better off without any pie / without knowing any of the test results on the list.

That's why the list in my hypothetical scenario is comprehensive. If I was saying that you'd be better off not knowing anything, then my hypothetical scenario could just have been "you get some kind of test result giving you information about some aspect of your health", rather than an unrealistic scenario where you get completely comprehensive information about your future health.

You are misusing academic language to mask a modification to your claim under interrogation. You specifically argued against “an awareness awakening by the sick individual that would bring a healthier lifestyle“ by stating it is “better off not worrying about it and enjoying your life.” You are now attempting to amend that claim by saying well of course you’re in favor of knowing about the bad things.

So what does this mean, that you actually support looking at a hypothetical comprehensive list, just that it should be sorted by severity so you don’t have to sweat the small stuff? That would be a fundamental modification of your original claim which had no such qualification.

My claim is consistent and perfectly simple. I'm saying that you'd be better off not knowing everything about your future health. It doesn't follow from that you'd be better off not knowing anything. As you seem to have difficulty understanding that, I've been trying to spell the logic of it out in explicit detail. For reasons I don't understand, you appear to interpret that as a modification of what I originally said.

What exactly would you be better off knowing? In general, that's a complex question and I don't know the answer. But certainly there are clear examples of things that are worth knowing (e.g. your weight, your blood pressure, whether or not you have TB ...)

>by the sick individual

I did not specify that the individual in the hypothetical scenario was sick.

Now you are claiming you didn’t argue against that claim you responded to, which specifically referenced a “sick individual” achieving an awareness “that would bring a healthier lifestyle.”

Indeed your claim was clear and simple: you disputed it, replying it was better not to worry about it and “enjoy your life.”

You have simply dressed up poor reasoning regarding “you’re better off not knowing” by pretending you were only referring to the things not worth knowing, not the things worth knowing, the other part of the set of all things. This is spurious argumentation designed to distract from the fundamental shift in your claim — that of course it is never too early to gain awareness of medical conditions that could motivate lifestyle changes and inform choices.

In the end I am glad you came around to agreeing with the comment, if by a circuitous route.

The quoted claim that I responded to was the claim that "it's never too early to know". Any my claim was made in relation to the hypothetical scenario that I spelled out, where it was not specified that the individual in question was sick.

I think you think I'm changing what I'm saying because you're still making the quantifier scope error. If you read through my comments paying more careful attention to the quantifier scope, you'll see that I've been saying the same thing consistently. I can only make sense of your responses if they are objections to "for all x, you're better off not knowing x", rather than to what I actually said. This misunderstanding is evident from several of your first comments. E.g. "Your hypothetical includes every illness and thus, cancer", and "This unambiguously refers to the list in its entirety." These replies only makes sense if you imagine that I'm saying that you don't want to know anything on the list. But this simply isn't what I said. Or at least, it's the least plausible interpretation of my original comment, and inconsistent with the explanations I've repeatedly made of what I meant.

I don't know why you are so reluctant to accept this. Early in this thread I politely pointed out the quantifier scope error in your interpretation. And the wrong interpretation that you insist on attributing to me has me saying something implausibly ridiculous (i.e. that all medical tests are bad!) Go back to my examples (A) and (B) earlier. Do you have difficulty understanding that (A) does not entail (B)? I doubt it. So why is it difficult for your to understand my claim about the list? I'm baffled.

The pie analogy is a good one. Every piece of the pie is nutritious and worth eating (let's say). Similarly, every item on the unrealistically comprehensive list of medical information may be useful in and of itself. But just like you can have more pie than is good for you, you can have more information about future problems and risks than is good for you.