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

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It will help you find love, your children will suddenly start to look up to you, your wife will overlook your all too numerous infidelities and you’ll win the lottery. And this is all part of the reason why we are so easily fooled – the truth is that Lynn or Day, it hardly matters at all to our real lives. Asking over-confident bullshitters exactly how their idea might work is another way to slow them down. Positives about this book -- this is a short read that is really a set of seemingly off-the-cuff rants that have a lot of truth behind them. If Unherd starts having a golf column, I do not think employing Tom as the golf correspondent would be advisable.

Time after time, it was an unpreregistered study looking at 27 undergraduates which barely reached statistical significance. Last year an investigation on Irish television probed clinics in Istanbul that were claiming huge successes with unconventional therapies. And although mistakes do inevitably creep in during the writing and editing process, I was surprised that the letter M in the commonly used acronym, STEM, was erroneously attributed to medicine, instead of mathematics. I have heard about organisations that encourage employees to walk across hot coals, take military assault courses, and guide a raft down dangerous rapids.By far my favorite chapter in this book was the one on selection bias; it's easy to think about selection bias when you're reading an econ paper or a clinical trial and the cohort selection is explicit, but the authors show that variants of selection bias are at the root of many other pervasive statistical curiosities (e. From my own experience almost all headlines that have to do with medicine, including the coronavirus, are complete and utter bullshit. Cancer is oppressive and all-pervasive: half of us alive today will experience a direct brush with it. Does delayed gratification cause success (famous marshmallow trial) or does having rich parents correlate with a child being able to withstand not eating a marshmallow when it's in front of their face? Skepticism is important, and so I applaud these professors in their mission to fight BS, and much of what they talk about is important and true.

It isn’t even so much the advice, sometimes I want to bang my head against the wall because it isn’t all good advice, but I am theorizing it is because I feel connected to all the other readers looking for the same things I am.Even when we smell bullshit, we are willing to ignore it so we can avoid conflict and maintain a polite atmosphere.

Tem toda uma parte sobre relações de causa e efeito e testes estatísticos que outros livros como o How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking ou o The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't cobrem, mas que mesmo assim é bem interessante e complementa bem o que é discutido. I won't say the whole book was perfect, even though it was pretty good throughout, but finding this nugget in it was apparently why I needed to read it. It's not just that I had hand sanitizer, toilet paper and was ready to shelter at home: at a time when the lockdown hadn't yet begun and we had no testing and therefore didn't know the local numbers in our region, his scientific posts along with those of the colleagues he elevated like STAT News reporter Helen Branswell and Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch may have saved lives in my circle in particular, and certainly saved that of others in the wider world. Compare with the p value of the Einstein’s prediction that light will bend when passing by a massive object and you realise the shallowness of the claim that psychology is a science. And that would not stop the endless flow of money and beautifully-crafted lies from powerful special interests.Whether you are confused by the anti-vax movement, which grew out of a single retracted medical study, to the claim that Artificial Intelligence can infer sexual orientation from analyzing a photograph of a person’s face, there is no shortage of nutty ideas out there to contemplate and dissect. The author also explains why people who are dating seem to meet nice people who are unattractive, or attractive jerks.

Robertson wants to get his readers to maximise their confidence, so he pushes its importance and overstates the effectiveness of various tricks to improve it. She might say: “My husband is relatively young, and reasonably fit, so that’s positive, but on the other side of the ledger he’s a lazy git and eats too many burgers, so overall I’ll give it 60%.Register a free business accountHardcover: 240 pages Publisher: HarperOne (November 6, 2018) Language: English ISBN-10: 0062570358ISBN-13: 978-0062570352 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.