Bad Science
Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.'Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. This book will be about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments - from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads. This book will help people to quantify their instincts - that a lot of the so-called 'science' which appears in the media and in advertising is just wrong or misleading. It will be satirical and amusing - exposing the ridiculous - but it will also provide the reader with the facts they need.Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.
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What Hacker News says
- Quite right. I remember Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science documenting a few examples. I hope these are the same examples raised in the letter, because otherwise a lot of miscarriage of justice has happened in the UK.
What I remember from the book is entirely innocent people jailed because the wrong statistical question was asked. IIRC along the lines of two deaths, and the question asked was what is the chance of this happening? As opposed to, assuming the first death, what is the chance of the second? As opposed to, assuming two deaths, what is the chance of bad luck versus malice.
(I am not commenting on the Letby case per se. AIUI there is an appeal pending and UK law can be rather strict. Simply, we should not respond to possible horrible events by convicting other people who are innocent of statistical flukes, or misrepresented statistics.)
- > Spend a few years in the field and you will realize that some studies are good and some are bad.
On this topic, I highly recommend Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. It's a brilliant read.
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. The knowledge in the book is more mainstream now than in 2008, but it gave me more "tools" to understand the fields of medicine and nutrition as a consumer.
- Then the scientists should spend their time naming and shaming other articles that those very journalists and papers have written, not contribute more bilge that others have to factcheck. This is not equivalent to ethical white hacking.
We need more people like Ben Goldacre ("Bad Science").
- Do you expect a single study to overturn decades of research and medical practice? Leaving aside that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', that would need to be extraordinary evidence, right?
I'm not surprised at all you doubt the existence - it's a very common phenomenon that modern medicine/science struggles to explain (yet) and it's a very weird phenomenon. E.g. placebos still work when you know it's a placebo, it works for animals, it works so well that insurance will cover it etc.
Maybe Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is a good starting point as a book.
- One of my favourite stories along these lines (this is from Ben Goldacre's great book Bad Science, and may be slightly misremembered in parts) is about Archie Cochrane, who gave his name to the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation who rigorously analyse the evidence for medical treatments, even "obvious" ones. He set it up after being a Japanese prisoner of war, where he had to make decisions about medical treatment in the face of extremely callous treatment by the Japanese officers. They were often decisions you only hear about in philosophical games - e.g. do you save one person's life or the sight of ten people - and he realised that much of his medical training was not based on proper evidence.
In the UK in the 1970s, hospitals started equipping expensive cardiac units, specifically designed for the treatment of heart attacks, full of expensive medical equipment (and if HN doesn't mind a good-natured tease, cardiac surgeons don't exactly shun the heroic mode of medicine). Part-way through a Cochrane study of their effectiveness, the data was pointing to survival rates being slightly higher when people were treated at home rather than in the cardiac units, but the results were not statistically significant. He decided to play a trick and annouced at an interim meeting that the data were pointing the opposite way - that treatment in cardiac units showed slightly higher survival rates, but were still not statistically significant. The doctors in the meeting were extremely angry that he insisted that the study should go on because the results were not statistically significant and therefore no conclusions could be drawn from the data. It wasn't until later in the meeting that he came clean, and told them that the data were pointing in the other direction. Funnily enough, none of the doctors still called for the study to be halted early in the face of identical evidence, just pointing to a different conclusion.
