“Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.”

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.

I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

The plural of anecdotes is not data

Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, and live your whole life in every way as well as you can: exercise regularly as part of your daily routine, avoid obesity, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, and don’t get distracted from the real, basic, simple causes of ill health.

But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.

There is this peculiar blind spot in the culture of academic medicine around whether withholding trial results is research misconduct. People who work in any industry can reinforce each others’ ideas about what is okay.

I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.

One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they have much in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learned through experience; but both can be informed by the experience of others.

Transparency and detail are everything in science.

Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.

Somebody the other day had a review, called me ‘America’s reprobate.’ And I don’t even know what that means, but I kinda like the way it sounds.

The way my brain processes information is quite odd. I mean, I have Attention Deficit Disorder and another learning disability I can’t even spell. I don’t even have a high school diploma. I’m smart, but you can’t prove it on paper.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of absurdities.

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.

If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.