You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity.

You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.

Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures.

Real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position.

Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.

I write about misuses of evidence in plenty of different spheres: scaremongering journalists, obvious quacks and naturopaths, and flaws in the way that evidence is used in mainstream academia, medicine and in (government) policy. One of the things I always found interesting is the same tricks are used to distort medicine in all of those domains.