Did That Treatment Actually Help You?

Image by Anna Shvets on Unsplash
A mistake we all make sometimes is attributing an improvement to whatever we've tried recently. For instance, we may get medicine from a doctor (or go to an acupuncturist) and feel better, so we conclude it worked. But did it actually work, or was it just chance? Here's a trick to help you decide: What matters (evidence-wise) is how likely that level of improvement would have been in that time period if the treatment works relative to how likely that improvement would have been if the treatm...
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How good is our sense of taste? Do we even know what we actually like?

Photo by Chris Ralston on Unsplash
I recently conducted an in-person mini-experiment on whether we can tell different beverages apart - and how much we like them (with co-organizer Hannah Vazquez). Different stations were set up, each containing small (<1oz) tasting cups of a single type of beverage (with 5-6 distinct beverages of that type, labeled A, B, C, etc. so that nobody could tell which was which). The stations were: 5 types of water 5 types of cold coffee 5 types of pinot noir red wines (of varying pric...
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Maybe you can justifiably believe you can change the world with the right conditions

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Written: May 5, 2018 | Released: June 25, 2021 Can you justifiably believe that you may be able to really change the world? There's a certain seeming absurdity in believing you can change the world. And by "change the world," I don't mean playing a small (though still meaningful) cumulative role in bringing about change as part of a group of many thousands of people, each contributing incrementally. I mean, causing a large and important positive change to occur (and not merely by dumb lu...
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