More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As Scott Alexander of the blog Slate Star Codex put it: ‘This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot.’61
The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies. And in the end, isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no. Leonard Nimoy, The Simpsons
Split up your study into several publications and you’ll give the impression that there’s stronger support for the efficacy of your drug than if there were just one or two papers published on it. It’s a devious, but probably effective, tactic: busy doctors who see that there are six papers claiming support for one drug and only one paper for another might be more likely to prescribe the former, without necessarily noticing that the six papers on it are all sliced-up reports of the same study.
Goodhart’s Law: ‘when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure’.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bizarre theories about stem cell technology having been available in ancient India.23
Vinayak K. Prasad & Adam S. Cifu, Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
A related perverse incentive is that of the US Endangered Species Act, which incentivised landowners to destroy perfectly good habitat for rare animals, since doing so avoided their land being regulated.
