Bad Advice: How to Survive and Thrive in an Age of Bullshit

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If Unherd starts having a golf column, I do not think employing Tom as the golf correspondent would be advisable. She is now a passionate patient advocate, steering others away from damaging falsehoods – a problem she sees as unrelenting. What matters is that one understands what determines a causal relationship from a non-causal one and without supporting data my statement is just about as valid as what one gets from many usual sources of information. Creating "ducks" where the data doesn't fit the graph or "glass slippers" where data has been cut to fit a specified visual representation.

And indeed, for systems like AI or Machine Learning, they note that even the practitioners don’t know what’s inside the box. At first I thought this was going to be a rehash of all the other books out there on cognitive biases, but it turned out to include quite a few things I haven't heard articulated very well, like how the scientific process and publishing industry work, and about AI and big data (this section was excellent). V’s signaturecombination of humor, hard science, and heart make Bad Advice an iconoclastic coursecorrectionlike no other. If we believe that salad and jogging will have the desired effect – that we would, if we ate better and ran more, lose weight — then we have a “can happen” attitude.It is perhaps no surprise that the best sentence in this book reads "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. That chapter on selection bias was one of the most entertaining – it explains why your friends really do have more friends than you do (on average, of course! And this is because we live in a world where people are more interested in facts than narratives, in whats over whys.

The author's point out that the study is unfair as it only looked at germs responsible for respiratory infections, not generally.You'll learn about the Wakefield debacle connecting autism to MMR vaccine in 1998 which was based on a tiny cohort and has been completely disproved. That pseudoscience is being hawked to vulnerable patients isn’t a new problem – cancer scams have existed for decades, and combating them was the impetus behind the 1939 Cancer Act. Forget the all-seeing eye of AI and tech, if you start out with garbage training programs for the algorithm, you will get garbage out. O que mais gostei foi a descrição de como linguagem vaga é usada para mentir sem mentir diretamente, ou seja, contar bullshit.

In addition to studying disinformation, he's a bio professor and career epidemiologist, and his Twitter feed is why I was prepared earlier than nearly everyone for the pandemic, and was able to begin preparing family (which was not a simple matter at that early date, when there was still a lot of hesitation). In the humanities and the social sciences, students are taught to smash conflicting ideas up against one another and grapple with discordant arguments. I certainly didn’t go looking for them, but I got endless prompts based on keywords such as breast cancer. The first less charitable explanation is that Robertson, like many other moderately famous psychologists , has his eye on the lucrative after-dinner speaking market, and the way to get on that is to say that This One Weird Trick is all you need to totally change your life, whether it’s growth mindset or “grit” or power posing or whatever. V fuses the brains and insight of a nerdy PhD with the heart of a doting Italian mother and the artful profanity of a Philly trucker.Currently reading this one, but noticed that no one has yet dropped the link for the professors' course at UW, which has been available online since before the book was finished: https://www.