Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering. All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people.

As Voltaire said: ‘The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.’

the plural of anecdote is not data.

Moerman reframes the placebo effect as the ‘meaning response’: ‘the psychological and physiological effects of meaning in the treatment of illness’,

I would go so far as to say that even if we are all under the control of a benevolent God, and the whole of reality turns out to be down to some flaky spiritual ‘energy’ that only alternative therapists can truly harness, that’s still neither so interesting nor so graceful as the most basic stuff I was taught at school about how plants work.

the placebo is not about the mechanics of a sugar pill, it is about the cultural meaning of an intervention, which includes, amongst other things, your expectations, and the expectations of the people tending to you and measuring you.

George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.

‘Torture the data and it will confess to anything,’ as they say at Guantanamo Bay.

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives. Francis Bacon

‘Communal reinforcement’ is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief, through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched, or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people.

This breaks a cardinal rule of any research involving statistics: you cannot find your hypothesis in your results. Before you go to your data with your statistical tool, you have to have a specific hypothesis to test. If your hypothesis comes from analysing the data, then there is no sense in analysing the same data again to confirm it.