I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (61 page)

BOOK: I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
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Drink Coffee, See Dead People

Voices of the Ancients

BIG DATA

There’s Something Magical About Watching Patterns Emerge from Data

Give Us the Data

Care.data Can Save Lives: But Not If We Bungle It

Care.data Has Been Bungled

SURVEYS

The Huff

A New and Interesting Form of Wrong

‘Hello Madam, Would You Like Your Children to Be Unemployed?’

EPIDEMIOLOGY

Beau Funnel

When Journalists Do Primary Research

Confound You!

Bicycle Helmets and the Law

Screen Test

How Do You Know?

Anecdotes Are Great. If They Really Illustrate the Data

The Strange Case of the Magnetic Wine

What Is Science? First, Magnetise Your Wine …

BAD ACADEMIA

What If Academics Were as Dumb as Quacks with Statistics?

Brain-Imaging Studies Report More Positive Findings Than Their Numbers Can Support. This Is Fishy

‘None of Your Damn Business’

Twelve Monkeys. No … Eight. Wait, Sorry, I Meant Fourteen

Medical Hypotheses Fails the Aids Test

Observations on the Classification of Idiots

More Crap Journals?

GOVERNMENT STATISTICS

If You Want to Be Trusted More: Claim Less

Is This the Worst Government Statistic Ever Created?

Anarchy for the UK. Ish.

More Than Sixty Children Saved from Abuse

Home Taping Didn’t Kill Music

Is This a Joke?

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY

I’d Expect This from UKIP, or the Daily Mail . Not from a Government Leaflet

Andrew Lansley and His Imaginary Evidence

Why Is Evidence So Hard for Politicians?

Politicians Can Divine Which Policy Works Best by Using Their Special Magic Politician Beam

Pornography in Hospitals

The Power of Ideas

‘Exams Are Getting Easier’

Over There! An Eight-Mile-High Distraction Made of Posh Chocolate!

As Far as I Understand Thinktanks …

Meaningful Debates Need Clear Information

Minority Retort

Building Evidence into Education

DRUGS

A Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz

The Least Surrogate Outcome

Heroin on Prescription

LIBEL

NMT Is Suing Dr Peter Wilmshurst. So How Trustworthy Is This Company? Let’s Look at Its Website …

‘We Are More Possible Than You Can Powerfully Imagine’

Science Is About Embracing Your Knockers

The Return of Dr McKeith

QUACKS

The Noble and Ancient Tradition of Moron-Baiting

How Do You Regulate Wu?

Blame Everyone But Yourselves

MAGIC BOXES

ADE 651: WTF?

After Madeleine, Why Not Bin Laden?

Who’s Holding the Smoking Gun on Bioresonance?

AIDS

House of Numbers

Aids Denialism at the Spectator

ELECTROSENSITIVITY

Wi-Fi Wants to Kill Your Children … But Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch Sells the Cure!

Why Don’t Journalists Mention the Data?

POST-MODERNISM

Archie Cochrane: ‘Fascist’

IRRATIONALITY

The Golden Arse-Beam Method

Illusions of Control

Empathy’s Failures

Blind Prejudice

Yeah, Well, You Can Prove Anything with Science

Superstition

Evidence-Based Smear Campaigns

Why Cigarette Packs Matter

All Bow Before the Mighty Power of the Nocebo Effect

So Brilliantly You’ve Presented a Really Transgressive Case Through the Mainstream Media

BAD JOURNALISM

Asking for It

Jab ‘as Deadly as the Cancer’

Health Warning: Exercise Makes You Fat

The Caveat in Paragraph Number 19

Why Don’t Journalists Link to Primary Sources?

A Fishy Friend, and His Friends

MMR: The Scare Stories Are Back

Prevention Is Better than Cure When It Comes to Health Scares

Dodgy Academic PR

Suicide

Roger Coghill and the Aids Test

BRAINIAC

Ka-Boom! Science! COOL!!?!

Who’s the Daddy?

STUFF

Here’s My … Foreword to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway Guidebook

How I Stalked My Girlfriend

EARLY SNARKS

Staying Beautiful Is Easy to Do

Because You’re Worth It

More Than Water?

‘Nanniebots’ to Catch Paedophiles

Nanniebots and Neverland

Artificial Intransigence

BOOKENDS

Be Very Afraid: The Bad Science Manifesto

What Eight Years of Writing the Bad Science Column Has Taught Me

Footnotes

Notes

List of Illustrations

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Ben Goldacre

About the Publisher

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