Book review: Trick or treatment (2008)

post by Fleece Minutia · 2024-01-06T15:40:49.953Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Outline
  Reasons to read it
None
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TL;DR: Read if you enjoy witnessing applied rationality.

 

In their book from 2008, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst went through the evidence for and against a large range of alternative, a.k.a. complementary, health interventions. And wowza, was that an interesting journey!

 

Outline

The first chapter, titled "How do you determine the truth?" effectively fulfills its purpose. I wish my whole family had read and understood this chapter ;-)

Chapters 2-5 each take a close look at a well-known alternative treatment, describing its history and (postulated) way of working, then turning to the evidence and drawing conclusions from that. That is, the authors apply the standards from Chapter 1 to a selection of treatments.

Chapter 6, the last chapter of the book, is prescriptive. Fingers are pointed at different entities that cause the spread of useless or dangerous treatments, and suggestions made for what they should do differently. In my opinion it is optional; I understand why the authors include this, but I'm not convinced the information is useful for small fish like myself.

 

Reasons to read it

• The book is a tour de force in applied rationality: Put aside prejudice, consider the evidence regarding the thing being studied, then draw appropriately strong or weak conclusions. Reading it improved my procedural knowledge.
  • I especially like that they explain what concrete facts make them rate a piece of evidence as higher or lower quality.
• The authors take the reader by the hand. They provide illuminating anecdotes where appropriate, explain things in accessible but not imprecise ways, and remind us that strange ideas might work, even if their postulated way of working is inconsistent with our understanding of the world works.
• I learned a lot, including
  • More about placebo, including what it can and cannot do, and how to control for it in various contexts
  • That smart people can end up advocating absolute bogus. This, to me, is the Rationality equivalent of memento mori: You can have a great track record of being right and still be completely off the tracks.
  • The beautiful concept of Cochrane reviews: high-level summaries on what we (humanity) currently know about how well intervention A works on problem P, including and quality-weighting all the evidence to date. This seems to me like the top-tier golden ultimate standard in how sure we can be about anything, given the available data.
  • The inspiring story of Cochrane, the person. He was completely off the tracks for some time, for good reason, but recovered by embracing evidence.
  • That there's a huge variety of alternative treatments, and that there's often substantial variety within each "field". For instance, dogmatic acupuncture uses 12 meridians... or 14, depending on your school.
• For the tattletales, there's some sweet, sweet still ongoing drama with a certain prince, now king, using his influence to promote certain ineffective treatments.

 

In summary, I'll happily recommend this book to anyone interested in rationality or health. It has given me food for thought. Especially the Cochrane reviews are an interesting concept. I wish I knew of something similar for rationality techniques - if you know of some organization that periodically reviews of the sum of evidence around rationality techniques, I would love to know!

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