Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients." The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients.
Junk science is spurious or fraudulent scientific data, research, or analysis. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political, ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives.
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited. It is not the same as junk science.
Cultural bias is the interpretation and judgment of phenomena by the standards of one's own culture. It is sometimes considered a problem central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Some practitioners of these fields have attempted to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate cultural bias.
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory.
John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
A sexual norm can refer to a personal or a social norm. Most cultures have social norms regarding sexuality, and define normal sexuality to consist only of certain sex acts between individuals who meet specific criteria of age, consanguinity, race/ethnicity, and/or social role and socioeconomic status.
Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of the contracts are considered as the aggregated belief.
Allopathic medicine, or allopathy, is an archaic and derogatory label originally used by 19th-century homeopaths to describe heroic medicine, the precursor of modern evidence-based medicine. There are regional variations in usage of the term. In the United States, the term is sometimes used to contrast with osteopathic medicine, especially in the field of medical education. In India, the term is used to distinguish conventional modern medicine from Siddha medicine, Ayurveda, homeopathy, Unani and other alternative and traditional medicine traditions, especially when comparing treatments and drugs.
Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic, and library and information science. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in epistemology. Different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant and these fundamental views have implications for all other fields as well.
An opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive, rather than facts, which are true statements.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post–World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is also credited with popularizing the term "conventional wisdom". Many of the ideas presented were later expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, The New Industrial State.
The Great Crash, 1929 is a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith and published in 1955. It is an economic history of the lead-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy. It was Galbraith's belief that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 was the best safeguard against its recurrence.
Cognitive inertia is the tendency for a particular orientation in how an individual thinks about an issue, belief, or strategy to resist change. Clinical and neuroscientific literature often defines it as a lack of motivation to generate distinct cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem or issue. The physics term inertia emphasizes the rigidity and resistance to change in the method of cognitive processing that has been used for a significant amount of time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is the perseverance of how one interprets information, not the perseverance of the belief itself.
The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time was Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith's final book, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004. It is a 62-page essay that recapitulates themes—such as the dominance of corporate power in the public sector and the role of advertising in shaping consumer demand—found in earlier works.
Mathematical models of social learning aim to model opinion dynamics in social networks. Consider a social network in which people (agents) hold a belief or opinion about the state of something in the world, such as the quality of a particular product, the effectiveness of a public policy, or the reliability of a news agency. In all these settings, people learn about the state of the world via observation or communication with others. Models of social learning try to formalize these interactions to describe how agents process the information received from their friends in the social network. Some of the main questions asked in the literature include:
- whether agents reach a consensus;
- whether social learning effectively aggregates scattered information, or put differently, whether the consensus belief matches the true state of the world or not;
- how effective media sources, politicians, and prominent agents can be in belief formation of the entire network. In other words, how much room is there for belief manipulation and misinformation?
Alternative medicine describes any practice which aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested or untestable. Complementary medicine (CM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), integrated medicine or integrative medicine (IM), and holistic medicine are among many rebrandings of the same phenomenon.
