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And Daniel said unto the guard… ‘Submit us to this test for ten days. Give us only vegetables to eat and water to drink; then compare our looks with those of the young men who have lived on the food assigned by the King and be guided in your treatment of us by what you see.’ The guard listened to what they said and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days they looked healthier and were better nourished than all the young men who had lived on the food assigned them by the King. So the guard took away the assignment of food and the wine they were to drink and gave them only the
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Does randomisation matter? As with blinding, people have studied the effect of randomisation in huge reviews of large numbers of trials, and found that the ones with dodgy methods of randomisation overestimate treatment effects by 41 per cent.
The Doctor Will Sue You Now
chapter about AIDS in south Africa
What’s truly extraordinary is that almost all of these problems—the suppression of negative results, data dredging, hiding unhelpful data, and more—could largely be solved with one very simple intervention that would cost almost nothing: a clinical trials register, public, open, and properly enforced. This is how it would work. You’re a drug company. Before you even start your study, you publish the ‘protocol’ for it, the methods section of the paper, somewhere public. This means that everyone can see what you’re going to do in your trial, what you’re going to measure,
My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Imagine a table with four cards on it, marked ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘2’ and ‘3’. Each card has a letter on one side, and a number on the other. Your task is to determine whether all cards with a vowel on one side have an even number on the other. Which two cards would you turn over? Everybody chooses the ‘A’ card, obviously, but like many people—unless you really forced yourself to think hard about it—you would probably choose to turn over the ‘2’ card as well. That’s because these are the cards which would produce information consistent with the hypothesis you are supposed to be testing. But in fact, the
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We tend to assume, for example, that positive characteristics cluster: people who are attractive must also be good; people who seem kind might also be intelligent and well-informed. Even this has been demonstrated experimentally: identical essays in neat handwriting score higher than messy ones; and the behaviour of sporting teams which wear black is rated as more aggressive and unfair than teams which wear white.
More concentrated drugs products are, after all, a natural consequence of illegality. You can’t buy coca leaves in Peckham, although you can buy crack.
If you visit the premises of the Royal Society in London, you’ll see its motto proudly on display: ‘Nullius in verba—‘On the word of no one’.
working in the NHS you meet patients from every conceivable walk of life, in huge numbers, discussing some of the most important issues in their lives. This has consistently taught me one thing: people aren’t stupid. Anybody can understand anything, as long as it is clearly explained—but more than that, if they are sufficiently interested.
The greatest problem of all is dumbing down. Everything in the media is robbed of any scientific meat, in a desperate bid to seduce an imaginary mass who aren’t interested.
