“Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.”

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.

As it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.

Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.

And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you’ll still be wrong, but you’ll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

More data is not always the answer.

Satan, the enemy is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.

The air passenger screening system Mexico has in place involves these checks against US national security and criminal data bases.

We must rely on our allies and foreign governments to share information and data to secure our country.

Wisdom in groups is earned by gathering useful data, exploring diverse perspectives, respecting different viewpoints, and then shaped through critical reflection on behalf of tangible outcomes.

I think that the default for collecting any kind of personal data should be opt-in consent.

Thus the moral consciousness is an innate and intimate revelation of the absolute, which goes beyond (or goes pass, or exceed) every empirical data (or given information).