Adam Kucharski

And I think we often particularly...

in a situation with emerging threats or kind of early concerns about things, whether it's, you know, a health intervention we think might be harmful.

I mean, one of the examples I've given the book is the work at the FDA around thalidomide, which was this treatment for sickness in pregnancy.

And

Yeah, there was actually a lot of concerns about safety for babies and the FDA blocked it as a result.

But on the other hand, you get things where there might be a lot of value, for example, in reducing smoking for health outcomes.

And even if there's uncertainty and Bradford Hill made this nice point of actually the standard you should apply for taking action kind of depends a bit on the situation you're dealing with.

If it's a fairly cheap action to take, if it's not too disruptive for people.

But actually, in his argument, he said smoking is something people really enjoy.

So we need a kind of higher barrier.

And I think it's a reasonable point.

If you're going to tell a lot of people to change how they live their lives, that the evidence you need is perhaps different for something where you can take some action and you can unwind that.

So it is those kind of tradeoffs that you have available that obviously need to play in as well.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that really kind of struck me in researching that.

I mean, even in some of these kind of mathematical puzzles examples, it's things that I'd come across as a kid and convince myself, oh, that's the answer to the puzzle.

And it was only years later when I was...

explaining it to someone else or someone else had asked me about it.

And I sort of went through the thing that convinced me and it just didn't convince them at all.

And I think that's a really interesting gap.

I think we focus a lot on, you know, how science works, how methods work, what convinces us.