Adam Kucharski

And if you just follow this simple rule, you know, if you do your p-value, you'll get there and you'll be fine.

And I think that's where a lot of the danger is.

And I think that's what we've seen over time.

So in science, people kind of chasing...

certain targets and all the behaviors that come around that or in certain situations disregarding valuable evidence because you've you've got this kind of gold standard and nothing else will do and I think particularly in in a crisis it's very dangerous to have that because you know you might have a sort of lower level of evidence that demands a certain action and

And you almost bias yourself towards inaction if you have these kind of very simple thresholds.

So I think for me, across all of these stories and across the whole book, I mean, William Gossett, who did a lot of pioneering work on statistical experiments at Guinness in the early 20th century, he had this nice question he sort of framed as, how much do we lose?

And it's kind of, if we're thinking about the problems...

Yeah, there's always more studies we can do.

There's always more confidence we can have.

But whether it's a patient we want to treat or a crisis we need to deal with, we need to work out actually getting that level of proof that's really appropriate for where we are currently.

Yeah, and I think it's something that writing the book and actually just reflecting on it subsequently has made me think about a lot in just how people approach these kind of problems.

I think that there's some idea that conspiracy theorists are just lazy and have maybe just fallen for a random thing.

But talking to people, you really think about these things a lot more in the field.

And actually, the more I've ended up engaging with people who believe things that are just out white, unevidenced around vaccines, around health issues, they often have this mountain of papers and data to hand.

And a lot of it, often, they will be peer-reviewed papers.

It won't necessarily be supporting the point that they think it's supporting.

But it's not something that you can just say everything you're saying is false.

There's actually often a lot of things that have kind of been put together and it's just that leap to that conclusion.

I think you also see a lot of scientific language kind of borrowed.