Ben Goldacre
speaker
65 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard May 2012
Ben Goldacre’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So we can try and identify which trials have gone missing in action.
The idea of setting these trials registers up was that essentially public shame was...
would prevent people from hiding data.
Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out like that.
And people have continued firstly to register trials, but then leave them unpublished.
But they've also continued to publish trials that weren't registered.
Back in basic science, it's an even more serious problem.
Last year, a chap called Bem published a paper showing that undergraduate students have some kind of power to predict the future with their minds, right?
And this paper was published in a very well-respected psychological journal.
And everybody said, well, this is probably a fluke finding.
Let's see if we can replicate it.
And so far, at least two different groups have gone out, tried to conduct exactly the same experiment, not found evidence of precognition.
and then submitted it to the journal and been told, oh, sorry, we're not interested in that finding.
So that's a very immediate human illustration of how this problem is still ongoing.
More or less, he's presented by Tim Harford, the Financial Times, undercover economist, producer is Richard Knight.
It's possibly one of the most ridiculous figures I've ever seen quoted in Parliament.
The 20% figure comes not from a department of competent statisticians in the civil service with access to all of the local government data.
It comes from this incredibly flimsy advertising leaflet from a private management consultancy firm called
Touting for Business, a private management consultancy firm which I hope we're sadistically not going to mention by name because they were obviously only doing it for the publicity.
And the short story of how they derived this 20% figure is they said, oh, we reckon we can save you 20% on your mobile phone bills.
Showing 21–40 of 65 · page 2 of 4
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