I know if I'm lost in the moment or not.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
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 write about misuses of evidence in plenty of different spheres: scaremongering journalists, obvious quacks and naturopaths, and flaws in the way that evidence is used in mainstream academia, medicine and in (government) policy. One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.
Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.
There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections
The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness.
I first got interested in music as a toddler by my childhood babysitter, Rosetta Atkins. She taught me how to sing by imitating the voices on the gospel radio station she listened to - both men and women's voices.
I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.