Adam Kucharski

And again, because this is never fully documented exactly what he thought, but it's one of the theories that it wouldn't just be outright, that it would just be this cyclic process of weakening and weakening and weakening and making it easier to add.

And actually, when I wrote that, it was one of the earlier bits of the book that I drafted.

i did i did sort of debate whether including it i thought you know is this actually just a bit in the weeds of kind of american history and here we are yeah it's it's remarkable yeah yeah no it's i mean i i found it uh you know quite it struck me when i was reading this because here back in 1947 there was somebody

Yeah, I think that encapsulates a lot of what the book is about, is that search for certainty.

And, you know, how far do you have to go?

And I think one of the things that, you know, so then there's a lot of interesting discussion, some fascinating kind of papers around at what point, you know, do you use these studies?

What are their flaws?

But I think one of the things that does stand out is, you know, across fields, across science, medicine, even if you're going to kind of law, AI, the

Having these kind of cookie cutter, you know, this is the definitive way of doing it.

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.