The plural of anecdotes is not data
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.
More Ben Goldacre Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.
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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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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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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.
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Just just because there are flaws in aircraft design that doesn’t mean flying carpets exist.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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