They explained it pretty simply - they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors, and they aggregated and compared those ratings.
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.
If you wanted to know the best web application framework to build your next REST API, would you build a mathematical theory for deducing it, or find out what the relevant experts in the field think?
>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.
I wouldn't ask experts about application frameworks, I'd ask the people who use them. Similarly, drug experts, despite their profession, are not in a position to know the aggregate harm levels of various drugs. It's a misapplication of expertise and statistics, which apparently is the sort of thing the lancet has a fondness for.
If you wanted to make a legitimate measure of the harm of various drugs despite the inability to build a mathematical model, you could do a survey asking people about how often they use various drugs and their opinion of the harm they've been caused by various drugs (as user or non-user). You'd get systemic bias from peoples imperfect ability to judge harm but at least you'd have something instead of nothing.
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.
If you wanted to know the best web application framework to build your next REST API, would you build a mathematical theory for deducing it, or find out what the relevant experts in the field think?