Alex Edmonds

This is now increasingly open access.

But this leads to challenges as well as opportunities is that you can always corral information.

to support whatever you want to support and this is a particularly a problem if you are biased right so if i wanted an excuse to drink a lot of red wine after dinner this evening i would just google why red wine improves your health and i'm sure i could come up with a lot of high highly cited studies and highly circulated studies to support this

So what this means is that what matters is not just whether there's a study.

We often hear the phrase, research shows that X, studies show that Y.

But studies show nearly everything you want them to show.

What matters is the quality of research and these issues we've discussed, such as correlation versus causation.

That is critical to finding out whether research is of sufficient quality for you to change your decisions based on it.

Or is this just conventional wisdom?

Or to be unfair, is this just an old wives tale?

That is indeed kind of how most people operate.

And then what I'm trying to highlight is, well, how can you be different from most people?

So sometimes it might not be life or death situations, but it's just affects our understanding of the world.

So you might think, oh,

Why is inflation higher in one country rather than another?

What causes unemployment?

What causes economic success?

And I might not be a central banker with the ability to directly cause inflation or control inflation, but I just want to understand the world better.

And I think to have a more discerning look at the data just helps me having a richer understanding.

Even if there's no practical effect on decision making, is not my knowledge of the world just richer if it's a bit more informed?