Sunday, March 22, 2015

2921 - False conclusions


Here is an ARTICLE about how we come to false conclusions and then stick with them despite evidence to the contrary.

From the article...

In this respect, doctors are only human, and so it’s not so surprising that the medical profession is filled with practices that have been disproved. Even when the evidence for or against a treatment or intervention is clear, medical providers and patients may not accept it. In some cases, the causality illusion is to blame, but usually the reasons are more complex. Other cognitive biases — such as motivated reasoning (all of us want to believe that the things we do make a difference), base rate neglect (failing to pay attention to what happens in the absence of the intervention), and confirmation bias (the tendency to look for evidence that supports what you already know and to ignore the rest) — also influence how we process information. In medicine, perverse incentives can push people in the wrong direction. There’s no easy fix here.

It's a medium length article for the internet. Not tooooo long.




4 comments:

eViL pOp TaRt said...

A great cartoon and a caution against assuming too much of the future. '97 was pre-Kindle days.

John A Hill said...

"Simply exposing people to more information doesn't help."
Interesting.

John A Hill said...

"Simply exposing people to more information doesn't help."
Interesting.

Cherdo said...

I used to be a nurse. Our rule is when a family member is in the hospital, you never leave them and you never accept an answer that doesn't sound right.

Your article contains a lot of the reasons why! But the main reason is that medicine has become a "squeaky wheel get the grease" game.