The Fallibility of Certainty

The fallibility of certainty.

An old-timer physician of New York, who was forever questioning the methods and purpose of his colleagues, concluded a Grand Rounds in his department with the observation, “No patient is in real danger until all his doctors agree on his diagnosis.” Those of us at the session dutifully applauded and laughed, left the meeting, but never forgot his perceptive warning. We all crave certainty, yet s...

RUNNING HEAD: FLEXIBILITY AND FALLIBILITY OF MEMORY On the Flexibility and the Fallibility of Associative Memory

The authors report the results of four experiments that explored the flexibility and fallibility of associative recognition memory. In each experiment, pairs were studied one or more times, and the task was to discriminate intact from rearranged pairs. The critical findings are that the pattern of false-alarm rates were dependent on the nature of the recognition procedure (e.g., ratings versus ...

The fallibility of HIV western blot.

Fallibility in estimating direct effects.

We use causal graphs and a partly hypothetical example from the Physicians' Health Study to explain why a common standard method for quantifying direct effects (i.e. stratifying on the intermediate variable) may be flawed. Estimating direct effects without bias requires that two assumptions hold, namely the absence of unmeasured confounding for (1) exposure and outcome, and (2) the intermediate...

the illusion of certainty and the certainty of illusion: a caution when reading scientific articles

critical thinking is necessary to read the scientific literature. however, in addition to questions about the science, often one must also question the meaning of the text. this article provides an example of the analyses needed to understand a single sentence. in so doing, it raises several interesting issues of meaning, measurement, statistical analyses, and the form in which results are pres...