Wrong

David H. Freedman, “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them”, Little Brown & Co, 2010, 284 Pages

This is a must read book: It's about all the forces that push experts, be they top scientists, high-powered consultants, pop gurus, financial whizzes or journalistic pundits, into misleading us with flawed advice, and discusses ways to tell good expert advice from the dubious stuff.

Freedman states that about two-thirds of the findings published in the top medical journals are refuted within a few years; as much as 90% of physicians' medical knowledge has been found to be substantially or completely wrong. In fact, there is a 1 in 12 chance that a doctor's diagnosis will be so wrong that it causes the patient significant harm. Economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong. Professionally prepared tax returns are more likely to contain significant errors than self-prepared returns. Half of all newspaper articles contain at least one factual error.

Most experts are influenced by one or more insidious influences: pressure to publish in measurement-obsessed journals, the need to avoid offending influential peer reviewers, the need to navigate the politics of tenure and funding, the need to win lucrative corporate contracts, come up with conclusions that please sponsors, or the need to conform to the agendas of government bureaucrats and elected officials.

Pg. 58: Consider how studies seem to have revealed a link between antidepressants and suicide. It has long been known that patients suffering a severe bout of depression are particularly likely to attempt suicide not in the depths of their depression but when they start to emerge from it. That means that in the near term antidepressants might lead to suicidal thoughts because the drugs are working—and over the long term would more likely reduce the chances that a patient will attempt suicide.

Pg. 62: Even established major drugs don’t work on 40 percent to 75 percent of people, according to a 2005 review paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the variation in effectiveness and risk of side effects tends to be much greater for newer, less proven drugs.

Pg. 81: Advice that is likely to be right, or at least on the right track, will be complex, it will come with many qualifications, and it will be highly dependent on conditions. Because of all the ifs, ands, or buts, it will be difficult to act on.

Pg. 95: Groups are frequently dominated not by people who are most likely to be right but rather by people who are belligerent, persuasive, persistent, manipulative, or forceful.

Pg. 97: The psychiatric community view of autism has shifted from insisting that autism is a narrowly defined and rare disorder associated with bad parenting to insisting that it is a brain flaw manifesting as almost any odd behavior, personality glitch, or communication problem in a very young child. The result is that autism has gone from being grossly under diagnosed to heavily over diagnosed. (The best evidence is that 0.7 percent of the population is affected).

Pg. 121: The vast majority of published research is never replicated or validated, or if it is, there is no record of it in research journals. All but the most prominent research tends to enter the records and forever persist as apparently legitimate by default.

Pg. 212: A company that is paid regardless of its performance is a company that will eventually underperform. In other words, it may well be that in neglecting to tie the career advancement and status of experts to their rightness, we virtually ensure that rightness will end up being somewhat neglected by them. Instead, experts are more likely to become quite good at that which more directly and clearly pays off: getting published, getting cited, and getting attention, for example with all the rightness-degrading biases that the drive to maximize such outcomes can entail.

Pg. 255: In the early 1990s the Canadian surgeon Roger Poisson was found to have falsified data on ninety-nine patients in fourteen large patient studies of cancer treatments, which had led doctors to recommend to tens of thousands of women that they forgo mastectomies for early-stage breast cancers in favor of lumpectomies and radiation.