Charles Piller
speaker
984 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 17 Apr
Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm excited to speak with you because a passion of mine in the healthcare space is talking about trust in science, in medicine. When I have a patient sitting across from me, the most important thing that I think about is the doctor-patient alliance. How can we get onto the same page? Because without that level of trust, we technically have nothing.
I'm basically a robot saying science words, and if they're not landing, they're not making an impact, I'm not helping. These days, I feel like there's been a tremendous loss of trust in our scientific institutions. A, have you seen that happen? And B, what do you think is leading the way for that to occur?
Well, I think it's tragic. Myself, as someone who tremendously support scientific research and the wisdom of doctors, truly. It's been very sad to see the decline in public understanding of how important those processes are. I think it's due to a couple things. One is I think there are people in society who are using
Doctors and some of the medical situations we've been experiencing, such as the pandemic, beat up on institutional authorities like in medicine and for political purposes. And I think that's horrible and unfounded, unwarranted. The second thing is that science and medicine sometimes have an arrogance problem. And they use the idea that trust us or the experts.
And unfortunately, that trust has to be won, not just assumed. And when you have situations where there are missteps, honest human mistakes, or scandals associated with misconduct, Or simply just bad moves, bad policy moves. What you see is that often scientists are entrusted with policy decisions for which they have no specific expertise.
Or decisions about how to run things in society that they might claim expertise for, but they actually have no special expertise for. And those are the reasons why I think sometimes people develop mistrust in science.
Now, as for me, I'm deeply, deeply determined to try to fight off the needless skepticism, the needless complaints about problems in science and in medicine, but also to be serious about identifying problems where they are in order to strengthen the scientific infrastructure, if you would, to strengthen the ability of doctors to have those honest and effective conversations with patients.
So are you saying you seek to be critical of the scientific method of the scientific agencies in order to make it more valuable to the general public?
I would just change one word there. Not so much the scientific method, which I think in its highest form is a wonderful and well, well stated process of experimentation and and testing hypotheses. That part of it is terrific. It's where people cut corners or ignore important elements of the equation where you start to run into trouble.
And so, yes, I support the very excellent exercise of that method. And I support people who are trying their level best to deliver something important to the public, even if they do sometimes make mistakes. How would you describe the scientific method for the general public? Well, science is a series of iterations.
And I think one of the great things about science is that every new discovery opens up vast new areas of ignorance in order to be able to explore and improve upon what we know. So I would say it's... bringing in a hypothesis forward, testing it, and then learning from those tests what amount of that hypothesis was true and correct and can be applied to human benefit.
Sometimes we see that these ideas are completely without foundation when they're tested, and those should be discarded. Others have a grain of truth or an element of them that could be extended and made into something very valuable. Every so often, there are tremendous breakthroughs that are discovered in a single or a single series of experiments.
Why do you think that currently in our state of media, there's a lot of fanfare where there's a positive scientific research article? And yet when there is a negative finding where it negates something that we thought or perhaps something that we believed in at once, there is less fanfare about that, less correction or noise about the correction. Why do you think we don't focus on those as much?
Well, I think there's one fundamental problem in the scientific literature that leads a bit to this, which is that careers are made on discoveries. They're not made on repeating experiments and finding that they don't work after all.
Isn't that why we have the replication crisis that we currently do?
It is. And you see it in all different fields, not just, of course, in Alzheimer's disease, but in all different kinds of medicine and social sciences. Psychology a lot? Absolutely. Yeah, it's a big problem.
And for those who don't know, the replication crisis is if we had a piece of research done in the 1950s, we try and replicate the same research with similar methods, we don't usually get the same results. And that's a problem because generally speaking, when we do a piece of research, we should be able to, using the same methods, get to the same results.
Why do you think that we're not being able to replicate those studies? You think it's largely because of fraud, methodological errors, something else?
I think it has more to do with the incentive structure of science and how scientists build their careers. So often the paradigm publish or perish is extremely true in all different realms of science, in biomedical science, in physics, in sociology, whatever scientific field you're in. And That means creating a lot of papers.
And one thing that we know from bitter experience is that people don't go back and say, hmm, this didn't look quite right. This other scientist's work didn't look quite right. I'm going to check it out. do an experiment of my own that's similar or the same as this, because it's very difficult to get those published.
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