Now I have finished with all earthly business, and high time too. Yes, yes, my dear child, now comes death.
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.
Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.
I tended not to be concerned about whether a song was going to be a hit when I wrote it. Because it became evident that none of us knew what was a hit and what wasn't. So I thought if I just write what I like, why shouldn't people like what I like?
If you choose to concentrate on the dark side, this is what you will see.
To me, Sheitan movie is the answer to all the problems we have in France concerning immigration. That is a fake problem; people can actually work together and do something very interesting out of it.
I'm trying to look at my blessings and how amazingly well against all odds things have turned out for me.