This post is a restatement of a previous analogy that needed further refinement. I just realized that it wasn't the analogy itself that needed refinement, but rather the title. So I'm restating the analogy under a more accurate title.
Imagine you have a big, ugly mole. You hate it and wish it wasn't there.
However, you live in a society that thinks beauty marks are attractive.
You've made inquiries about the possibility of getting your big ugly
mole removed, but you get a lot of push-back (and some doctors outright
refuse to do it) because there are a lot of people in your society who
put a lot of time and effort and resources and emotional drama into
getting plastic surgeons to give them beauty marks.
On top of all this, your mole has all the characteristics of a cancerous
mole. Unfortunately, your society doesn't have the ability to detect
cancer before it starts metastasizing so you have no way of proving or
disproving that your big ugly mole is cancerous, but it does have all
the characteristics.
Now, within this context, suppose you have to get surgery in the general
vicinity of you big ugly mole. You ask the doctors if they can remove
the mole while they're doing surgery in that area, but they refuse. You
try to emphasize to them that you don't like the mole and don't want
the mole, but they are not swayed. You beg them to, at the very least,
not prioritize saving the mole - to give you the most effective surgery
without regard for whether the mole is lost, but they still take
specific measures to save it despite your protests. And, perhaps, their
efforts to save the mole result in a suboptimal approach to the surgery
as a whole.
And when you complain about this, people tell you "He's just looking out for your health!"
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