I really do expect more from the Sunday Times Magazine than this. The cover story this week is on the science of epidemiology, and the tease on the cover made it sound like it was going to be a good read. But I gave up after the first of nine pages, and I'll show you two of the reasons why. First...
Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.
Technically the statement I've highlighted above is true, but in the context of modern science it is meaningless. There are only "an infinite number" of possible hypotheses about something if you include anything and everything anyone might ever think of, including things that have no scientific basis whatsoever. That is of course not how actual science works, and to suggest that it is in an article about the complexities of science is an unforgivable mistake.
But it only gets worse from there. A few paragraphs later, this:
While it is easy to find authority figures in medicine and public health who will argue that today’s version of H.R.T. wisdom is assuredly the correct one, it’s equally easy to find authorities who will say that surely we don’t know. The one thing on which they will all agree is that the kind of experimental trial necessary to determine the truth would be excessively expensive and time-consuming and so will almost assuredly never happen. Meanwhile, the question of how many women may have died prematurely or suffered strokes or breast cancer because they were taking a pill that their physicians had prescribed to protect them against heart disease lingers unanswered. A reasonable estimate would be tens of thousands.
Got that? First the author tells us there is no scientific consensus on the subject, but then he tells us that "a reasonable estimate would be tens of thousands." Those two statements are so obviously mutually exclusive that its hard to understand how they were first written and second published.
Maybe the rest of the article gets better, but I'm not willing to expend the effort to find out. Really, the NYT can, should, and must do better than this. Really.
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