Category: General

The Twilight of Expertise (part 2)

Seth Roberts21 Comments

The first experts were shamans, an occupational category that eventually divided into doctors and priests. As the Catholic Church became more and more powerful, abuses of priestly power became more and more apparent and upsetting, leading to the Protestant Reformation.

Now — half a millennium later — doctors are under much greater scrutiny. The results of that scrutiny are unfavorable — perhaps highly unfavorable. A RAND study suggested that the overall benefit of a substantial amount of health care was small, except in certain special cases such as eyeglass prescription. A large fraction of surgeries are unnecessary, says one critic–and by large he means large:

Stanford University urologist Thomas A. Stamey, M.D., generally regarded as the father of PSA testing, says that 90 percent of all the prostatectomies performed at the Stanford hospital over the past 5 years have been unnecessary.

Earlier post on this topic.

Addendum: According to Biotech Blog,

There’s been a shift in the past 50 years away from the doctor-centric model of healthcare to one in which patients expect, and demand, better information and control over their treatments.

——————————————————————————————–

A 70-293 is a much better choice than 70-296 for someone who plans to do 70-291 later. If the future plans revolve around 70-526, it is alright otherwise.

Vows = The Hunt?

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

I told Joyce Cohen that I liked her column “ The Hunt” far more than the rest of the New York Times because it was about everyday life. They should have other columns like yours, I said — about finding a job or a mate, for example. She said that the Vows section was sort of like that.

That’s true. But how much?

Maybe I should give each Vows article a 0-100 Hunt score according to how well it approximates a Hunt column. I started reading the most recent one. Then I came to this:

She is the host of “Winning Advice,” on ABC Radio, and the author of “The Millionaire Zone: Seven Winning Steps to a Seven-Figure Fortune” (Hyperion). . . . But when the lopsided conversation turned to business, Ms. Openshaw perked up.

And decided I would not pursue my ranking system.

One-Sided Critiques of the Day

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Here is an example of the negative evaluation bias I mentioned earlier. Larry Sanger criticizing a comparison of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Some might point to Nature’s December 2005 investigative report—often billed as a scientific study, though it was not peer-reviewed—that purported to show, of a set of 42 articles, that whereas the Britannica articles averaged around three errors or omissions, Wikipedia averaged around four. Wikipedia did remarkably well. But the article proved very little, as Britannica staff pointed out a few months later. There were many problems: the tiny sample size, the poor way the comparison articles were chosen and constructed, and the failure to quantify the degree of errors or the quality of writing. But the most significant problem, as I see it, was that the comparison articles were all chosen from scientific topics. Wikipedia can be expected to excel in scientific and technical topics, simply because there is relatively little disagreement about the facts in these disciplines. (Also because contributors to wikis tend to be technically-minded, but this probably matters less than that it’s hard to get scientific facts wrong when you’re simply copying them out of a book.) Other studies have appeared, but they provide nothing remotely resembling statistical confirmation that Wikipedia has anything like Britannica-levels of quality. One has to wonder what the results would have been if Nature had chosen 1,000 Britannica articles randomly, and then matched Wikipedia articles up with those.

“Tiny sample size”? Hmm. How often have you heard “the sample size was too large”?

Here is another example of a one-sided critique: her advisor’s reaction to her work (“My advisor started out tearing apart the things I had done”).

The New Yorker Crosses Another Line

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A few days ago the New Yorker website added magazine-quality material to only the website. Stuff just as good as the stuff in the magazine, but not in the magazine. This is a first for The New Yorker and perhaps for any magazine. The never-before-broken rule has been that the website-only stuff is inferior or at least subsidiary to the printed stuff.

The particular item is humor by James Collins, who used to write for Spy. Brilliant writer. I read his pieces over and over. I especially liked one about friendship (“The Nature of Friendship Today”). “My social life was paying off,” it began.

The New Yorker website doesn’t have a good place for Collins’s piece on the home page. It is listed under “Shouts & Murmurs” but there is no indication that, unlike the other Shouts & Murmurs links, which precede and follow it, it is online only. Well, yes, Jackie Robinson was a first baseman, but to describe Jackie Robinson as a first baseman is incomplete.

I suspect my old editor, Susan Morrison, is behind this just like I think she was behind the New Yorker line-crossing a few weeks ago. Incidentally, the printed Shouts & Murmurs (about a creative astronaut) is very good.

Don’t Follow the Money

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Dr. Erika Schwartz, a New York internist, rightly chastises the New York Times for a long article about stroke (part of a series on major causes of death) that says nothing about prevention. Schwartz attributes the over-emphasis on treatment to relative cost: Treatment is far more expensive than prevention. Memo to Gina Kolata: Don’t follow the money.

This is a genuine problem with self-experimentation: It costs almost nothing. No status-enhancing grant is required to do it. One of many ways that science is at odds with human nature.

Memorial University, Meet Zagreb University

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From this week’s BMJ:

The saga began in the late 1980s when Dr Chalmers was preparing a systematic review of epidural anaesthesia. He noticed that much of the text and data in a 1974 paper co-authored by Professor Kurjak were identical to those in a paper from a different group of authors published three years previously.

He reported his observations to the editor concerned and to Professor Kurjak’s university [Zagreb University]. Both requested that the matter be handled discreetly.

In 2006 Dr Chalmers discovered that Professor Kurjak continued plagiarising. A report in 2002 showed that he had taken material from a Norwegian doctoral thesis and published it under his own name as a chapter in a book on fetal neurology.

Likewise, Dr. Ranjit Chandra continued his misdeeds long after someone complained to his employer, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Memorial University and its President, Axel Meisen, deserve some sort of award for now claiming Memorial did nothing wrong when it allowed Chandra to continue.

More here. An editorial by me about how well universities handle this sort of thing.

Underrated Tourist Activity

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Riding the bus. I dislike riding the bus where I live but in strange cities it turns out to be a great way to see the sights. Getting on a random bus has worked well for me in Shanghai and Seoul. I just ride until I see something interesting. Today I took a long bus ride in New Orleans to get to the local Whole Foods to buy flaxseed oil.

The New Yorker Crosses a Line

Seth Roberts2 Comments

This week’s New Yorker contains an article (humor by Larry Doyle) that can be fully appreciated only online — it is full of hyperlinks. A press release calls the online version “an interactive version” of the article. A better term would be “the real version.” It’s the difference between a sculpture (the online version) and a picture of a sculpture (the print version).

Before Spy ran into financial trouble, I had had approved an article about someone in the software industry. At the time, the Internet and web pages were just starting. I envisioned my article with lots of pseudo-hyperlinks (underlined bits of text in the main article connected to text boxes). Since there was no online Spy it would have just been a form of footnote or annotation. Alas, the article was canceled. My editor at Spy, Susan Morrison, now edits the section of The New Yorker in which this line-crossing Spy ish article has appeared. “We [the editors of Spy] try to find new ways to present information,” Susan once told me, as some staffers played a board game that appeared in the next issue. Larry Doyle used to write for Spy. Congrats to both of them.

Could this have been cleverly timed to coincide with publication of Doyle’s new book? Probably.

Addendum: Doyle himself comments:

I have a humor piece in the New Yorker today — and it’s interactive! The piece is a website devoted to wedding plans of one particularly ambitious bride, crammed with links both real and fabricated: to her blog; to a new movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Lopez; to a site on how to treat stab wounds. Once you’ve bought the magazine and read the story, go to gwynnanddavesharetheirjoy.com and poke around (You need to read the story first, or the website won’t make sense.) You can also read the story for free online, but where’s the fun in that?

Love that dare not speak its name. Use of the old-fashioned term interactive is a hint that something is amiss. It’s not interactive in the print version, Larry.