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.
BEN GOLDACREChildren 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.
BEN GOLDACREI think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
BEN GOLDACREAnd 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.
BEN GOLDACREI write about misuses of evidence in plenty of different spheres: scaremongering journalists, obvious quacks and naturopaths, and flaws in the way that evidence is used in mainstream academia, medicine and in (government) policy.
BEN GOLDACREOne of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
BEN GOLDACREI 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.
BEN GOLDACREAmazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
BEN GOLDACREThe plural of anecdotes is not data
BEN GOLDACREThere 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.
BEN GOLDACREReal science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else’s position.
BEN GOLDACREI agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
BEN GOLDACREData 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 GOLDACREAs it is a major component of blood, water is vital for transporting oxygen to the brain. Heaven forbid that your blood should dry out.
BEN GOLDACREScience 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.
BEN GOLDACREBut as we will see, even these things are hard to do on your own, and in reality require wholesale social and political changes.
BEN GOLDACREEat 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.
BEN GOLDACRE