“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.”

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.

Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.

I hope that you will be asked to participate in a trial at some stage in your disease

The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It’s not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It’s about our beliefs and expectations. It’s about the cultural meaning of a treatment.

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.

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.

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).

People automatically assume and expect that every moment and every bit of personal data should be broadcasted on social media, especially as it relates to them – and thats just not cuttin’ it for me.

The distinction between right and wrong (“la distinction du bien et du mal”, Fr.), is nothing else than their unyielding (or implacable) opposition.

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

These are data points, not judgments of your ability to manage your diabetes.

Don’t use the language of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when talking about blood sugar numbers

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.