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Goldacre is a treasure: "Pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science really works."

Preamble:
--2023 update: according to Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, I've now read this book 9 times, so it certainly takes the prize for my most-read nonfiction book.
…Unfortunately, this in part has to do with my repeated reliance on Goldacre/this book for inspiration as I trudge through technical studies in epidemiology, as my heart is in bigger questions (capitalist and ecological crises, geopolitical economy).
...Despite this disclaimer, Goldacre is still one of the wittiest writers I've read; I'm grateful for all his efforts in his fields, I get giddy when he expands to those bigger questions, and I hope to broaden the synthesis.

Highlights:
--This collection of journalism (many from ) from my favorite popular science writer (focus on epidemiology, with a heap of big pharma, bad "science" quacks, and ugly media) is like reading a memoir of the author's intellectual battles, which I much prefer over generic here's-what-I-claim-to-remember-of-my-life memoirs.

Bridging the gap between science and society:
--Goldacre has found the antidote to taking all those dry, technical textbooks on statistics/research methodologies and bringing them to life, by portraying the real-life struggles over actually applying critical theory. It turns out the real world has many contradictory structures (ex. hierarchical power, profit-seeking, ignorance), with many dire consequences [emphasis added]:

Epidemiology is my day job � Bad Science and Bad Pharma are both, effectively, epidemiology textbooks with bad guys � and since the techniques of epidemiology are at the core of most media stories and squabbles on health, it’s very weird that you don’t hear the word more often. [COVID19 has likely just made a bigger mess]

--More variety than the 2 themed books mentioned, this collection features:

1) How is "science" best applied in the real world?
--Examining the best practices of "science" from an institutional perspective. Ex. the process of scientific publication (both results and methodology used) allows research to be openly reviewed/verified/falsified by the public community of science. This comes after "peer review", which is only a minimal filter prior to publication.
--Afterwards, systematic reviews/meta analyses can be applied to systematically (i.e. openly-defined methology) synthesis the many varying published studies on a particular scientific inquiry. After all, individual studies have numerous methodological limitations (sample size, time, resources, scope...) and may not even be reproducible, so a systematic aggregate view can bring out findings hidden in smaller studies.
…These are the best practices of “science�, resulting in Nullius in verba ("on the word of no one").
--Cochrane is the gold standard for medical research systematic reviews. Plenty of useful articles applying related topics like the “hierarchy of evidence�, etc. Since Goldacre uses public health to explain science, we are not just talking about physical/natural sciences neatly isolated from the mess of society. Thus, the best practice tools have a wide range of uses in social sciences, at the very least saving you from falling for not just pseudoscience but also pseudo social science like Outliers: The Story of Success.
…Goldacre in particular highlights education as a profession that would greatly benefit from systematic evidence [emphases added]:

In some parts of the world, it is impossible to rise up the career ladder of teaching without understanding how research can improve practice, and publishing articles in teaching journals. Teachers in Shanghai and Singapore participate in regular ‘Journal Clubs�, where they discuss a new piece of research, and its strengths and weaknesses, before considering whether they would apply its findings in their own practice. If the answer is no, they share the shortcomings in the study design that they’ve identified, and then describe any better research that they think should be done on the same question.

This is an important quirk: understanding how research is done also enables teachers to generate new research questions. This, in turn, ensures that the research which gets done addresses the needs of everyday teachers.

…While Goldacre further hints how this can be expanded to government policy to “revolutionise social policy�, we move closer to powerful structures conflicting with social needs (see next section). For what it’s worth, the Shanghai teacher example makes me wonder of the pragmatic policies in China that Westerners have so much trouble categorizing in abstract ideological terms (State capitalism? Market socialism? Communist authoritarianism? Socialism with Chinese Characteristics? Developmental statism?).
…We can add economics to my skepticism as well (ex. the recent hype of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty using randomized control trials to test economic aid� but what is the big picture of economic aid and development? The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions).
…Goldacre’s mentions of the crucial gap of providing “accessible summary information� (“knowledge translation�) to translate research for use by practitioners (and the public) is inspiring, as one of my focuses is on bridging the gap between critical academic research and on-the-ground movements/politics.

2) How is “science� abused in the real world?
--When science is abused, we have for example for-profit Big Pharma simply hiding unfavorable studies, creating massive publication bias that systematically distorts evidence-based knowledge (and in this example, pollutes evidence-based medical practice). I've summarized Big Pharma tricks in reviewing Goldacre's Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients.
...Keep in mind, these systematic, real-world deceptions rely on abstraction, rather than sensationalist Big Pharma scare stories (ex. anti-vaxxers, AIDs denialism, see below) sold to us on corporate/social media/“alternative medicine�, who all fail best-practice science. Two wrongs do not make a right; sadly, the public get caught in between (like in politics, between the Democrats vs. Republicans, both funded by the 1% against the public's interest). Hence, this book's title, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That...
--We should also note that, once we think about it, healthcare in theory is a socialist field (i.e. targeting social needs); indeed, the mission statements on accessibility (esp. universal healthcare) are downright communist (i.e. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need). Example:

Does variable-price competition work in healthcare markets? Working from first principles, markets for healthcare in which people compete on price as well as quality might be expected to produce lower-quality healthcare, because prices are easy to measure, while quality, in healthcare, is surprisingly difficult to measure: so quality suffers.

…It should not be a surprise the stark contradictions of healthcare within capitalism detailed in this book, which can be traced to early struggles between (Western) public health vs. capitalism (from Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World; emphases added):

It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since the emergence of capitalism] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise […]. It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend?

Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods � which were, in a way, a new kind of commons [social Commons] � had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.

--For more on critical epidemiology, see: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19
...This book revolves around best-practice science applied to social needs, so there is already a clearer assumption of socialist principles of affordable accessibility/justice (unlike, say, Bill Gates� favourite scientist: How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future). This is different from best-practice science applied to, say, the military industrial complex. This would require transcending the technical how? of best-practice, to re-examine the why? of social values.

3) Bad Media:
--Once again, taking an institutional perspective on how media is rewarded (i.e. profitable) to churn out sensationalist lies, and how difficult it is to correct the damage. Examples range from over-interpreting surrogate outcomes (ex. taking lab results on isolated chemical reactions and extrapolating to claims of curing diseases in real-world humans with all their complexities) to anti-vaxxers and AIDS denialism.
--We can expand and synthesize this critique to politics/social sciences (particularly ideological censorship):
a) The fabulous Vijay Prashad on "ideological censorship" in world news/geopolitics, using the vivid example of North Korea ( ), intro: Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
b) Yanis Varoufakis on propaganda of "economics" ( ), intro: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
c) Noam Chomsky on propaganda in "democratic" capitalist societies: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Elsewhere, Chomsky notes the elitist logic of the so-called “free market� of private for-profit media: in Britain, the working-class Daily Herald newspaper went out of business despite having 5 times (!) the readership of The Times, and twice the readership of The Times, Financial Post, and The Guardian (which Goldacre wrote most of these articles for) combined! Why? Because newspaper business model became driven by advertisements. The market: one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote.
d) Case studies of corporate propaganda and uses of "doubt": Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

4) "Lies, damned lies, and statistics":
--Statistics used correctly is meant to counter our human heuristics (biases/short-cuts we make to accomplish immediate, short-term survival routines, ex. spotting patterns, but way too blunt for rigorous analysis of the noisy world). However, these same heuristics can be exploited with bad (i.e. deceiving) statistics: How to Lie with Statistics.
--Topics include: sampling, confounding variables, randomness, probability and causality (e.g. random things happen all the time; you see a license plate of XXXXX, what are the chances of that? Well, it only becomes interesting if you had predicted it ahead of time. This gets into study design, and extrapolating from results instead of testing a fixed hypothesis, where the experiment is designed to reduce sampling error, etc.)�

5) “Research about research�:
---On my recent reads, I’ve been focusing on the big picture analyses of “research about research� (“meta-research�, “metascience�). Results range from healthy corrections (where poor results are detected, improved and practices updated) to systematic biases in entire fields (psychology, brain imaging studies� a coincidence that so many swamp mosters emerge from these fields?).

(search "Bad Science" to get a better resolution; note: Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks provides a more cohesive step-by-step guide):