Dean Ornish contributes his response to a series of invited essays on the topic “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” His choice is the large randomized controlled trial. While I believe his criticism is too one-sided, he does raise some interesting points about the difficulty in using large trials to assess behavioral interventions.
Ornish D. Edge: What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement–Large Randomized Controlled Trials. Available in html format.
While we’re at it, take a look at
- Gerd Gigerenzer’s comment about scientific inference versus statistical rituals)
- Gary Marcus’s comment about big data
- Bart Kosko’s comment about statistical independence
- Gary Klein’s comment about evidence based medicine
- Chalres Seife’s comment about statistical significance
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s comment about the standard deviation
- Melanie Swan’s comment on the scientific method
- Richard Nisbett’s comment on multiple regression as a means of discovering causality
- Adam Alter’s comment on replication as a safety net
- Emanuel Derman’s comment on the power of statistics