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

Ben Goldacre

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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Data Fabric Pavement
If I was writing a lifestyle book it would have the same advice on every page, and you’d know it all already.
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Book Real Writing
Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
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Facts Pieces Together
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.
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Blood Oxygen Water
Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.
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Children Talent
You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.
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Body Mind Play
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
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Cancer Inspiration Motivation
I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me – I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity.
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Activities Leisure People Talking
I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.
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Linking New Rule Source Transparently
Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best.
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Data Decision Doctors
Yes. I’m a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.
BEN GOLDACRE

Doctors People Roles
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.
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Daily Excercise Life Lot Obesity Routine Vegetable
But as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.
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Change Own Political Require
One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
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Interesting Medicine Trick
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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Argument People Reason
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.
BEN GOLDACRE

Differences Medicine Teaching

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

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

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