The Hidden History of Evidence-Based Everything (with Helen Pearson)
About this episode
This episode explores the history and importance of evidence-based practices across various fields and the challenges in implementing them.
Read the full transcript here. How do we know whether the things we do every day actually work? Why do so many practices in medicine, parenting, education, conservation, and public policy begin as intuition, authority, or anecdote rather than careful evidence? What can the tragic history of front-sleeping advice and sudden infant death syndrome teach us about the danger of untested conventional wisdom? How should we distinguish between a bad outcome, a bad decision, and a reasonable decision made under uncertainty? When does intuition work well, and when does it fail because we lack repeated examples, tight feedback loops, or meaningful outcome data? What makes randomized trials so powerful, and why are they still only one part of the evidentiary picture? How should we weigh anecdotes, observational studies, randomized trials, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical guidelines, expert judgment, patient values, and political constraints? Why do people resist evidence when it threatens their identity, authority, or past decisions? What does evidence-based medicine get right that fields like education, policing, business, and conservation still struggle to embed? And in a world…
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