False Beliefs Held by Intellectual Giants

July 15, 2023

Even many of the smartest people that have ever lived convinced themselves of false things (just like the rest of us). Here are some fun and wild examples: (1) Linus Pauling won TWO Nobel prizes - one in peace and one in chemistry. Unfortunately, he eventually became obsessed with and widely promoted the false (and sometimes still repeated) idea that high-dose vitamin C cures many diseases, including HIV and snakebites. (2) Isaac Newton, who co-invented calculus and discovered t...

Did That Treatment Actually Help You?

April 15, 2023

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...