This morning I was in the gym, half-watching CNN as I did my usual exercises. Mathew Chance, a senior international correspondent based in Moscow, recapped the horrific scene involving explosions at two metro stations at the peak of rush hour. Chance reported that the bombers were both women. Most of the other facts surrounding the tragedy remain uncertain, he said. John Roberts, one of the CNN hosts, asked about any claims of responsibility for the terrorist attacks.
“Well, in fact, we had some information earlier today,” Chance responded. “…there had been a claim of responsibility…But that information appears to be incorrect.”
Wow! Now, there’s an AM Fix.
Can information be wrong? Of course it can, we all know. There’s good evidence for this in my medical textbooks, among other reliable sources.
Lately, and especially since I started this blog, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of information – how we define it, how and if it might be distinguished from data, and what separates information and opinion.
“Information is the lifeblood of modern medicine,” wrote Dr. David Blumenthal in a carefully-designated “perspective” piece in the February 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. He continued:
Health information technology (HIT) is destined to be its circulatory system. Without that system, neither individual physicians nor health care institutions can perform at their best or deliver the highest-quality care, any more than an Olympian could excel with a failing heart…
OK, so information needs to get around. It’s kind-of like blood; we can’t thrive without it. We won’t win any gold medals in health-care delivery before implementing the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.
I agree on the essentialness of information in medical practice and decision-making. But that brings us back to the crucial issue of its nature — how people, doctors, scientists, news reporters or anyone, literate or otherwise, can tell if something’s true or untrue.
Last year in journalism school at Columbia University I took a course called “Evidence and Inference.” We went as far back as Plato’s cave, and as far forward as the New York Times’ 2002 reporting on possible evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The point of the exercise, in sum, was that it’s sometimes hard, even for inquisitive journalists, scholars and scientists, to tell fact from fiction.
(Rest assured, I didn’t need a graduate course at Columbia to learn that much, although I did enjoy going back to school.)
Last week’s cover story in the Economist, on “Spin, Science and Climate Change,” drew my attention to some parallels between the Climategate controversy and distrust regarding other areas of scientific and medical knowledge. In a briefing within, the author or authors write:
…In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps, misperceptions and mistakes. Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down. When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.
The authors go on to consider some ramifications of a consensus effect. (There’s an interesting discussion on this, which relates to a herding effect, in a recent post by Respectful Insolence). Meanwhile, house-of-card-ists, dubbed doubters, emphasize errors from confirmational bias, or the tendency of some people to select evidence that agrees with their outlook.
There’s far more to consider on this subject — how we perceive and represent information — than I might possibly include in today’s post. So let’s just call this the start of a long conversation.
Getting back to medical lessons — the problem is that most of us can’t possibly know what’s really right. (Yes, I mean doctors too.) Few know enough of the relevant and current facts, or even the necessary terms, to make decisions about, say, which therapy is best for Ewing’s sarcoma in a four-year-old child or whether a new drug for Parkinson’s is worth a try in your dad’s case. Even for those of us who know something about statistics, it’s tricky.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to a matter of trust in the people who provide us information. It’s about knowing your source, whether that’s Deep Throat, a person reporting from the street in Moscow early this morning, or your personal physician.
Well, it’s a holiday for me over the next few days. I’ll read some history first, and then some fiction.
E–
i agree with your comment that ultimately one must know and trust the source of one’s information. But I find that it is harder and harder to get information from a physician–time constraints during appts., patient gaps in knowledge, and, overall, the lack of building a relationship, since one usually sees the doctor only when ill. I gauge my physician’s merits by my son’s pediatrician visits–which are once a year without fail, and are long and chatty discussions of the present and future. Grown-ups don’t usually have that sort of predictability– healthwise or timewise– Thanks for all the great food for thought, JF
Thanks for pointing to the different sorts of discussions that happen when people visit the doctor regularly, including some times when they’re not sick. Besides longer conversations, and raised comfort levels each with the other, routine visits give doctors a chance to know their patients’ “healthy” side.