Category: News and Events

Don’t Trust Your Gut, Use Your Brain (and Data) for Decision-Making

Posted on by Devon Herrick

We’ve all met that person whose knee-jerk reactions are based on emotions even if they’re illogical to anyone but them. I’ve also heard people who say, “always go with your first thought, it’s usually the correct decision.” Or I’ve heard others say, “Always trust your intuition, it’s usually right.” Aren’t so-called gut-feelings the same as intuition and emotions?

Should intuition and gut-feelings play a role in logical decision making? Not according to the new book Don’t Trust Your Gut, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Stephens-Davidowitz was a philosophy major at Stanford, who later earned a PhD in economics from Harvard. He is a former data scientist for Google. This is what he told Vox in an interview…

+

Thursday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman
  • Moffit: In the face of Covid, Medicare Advantage enrollees did better than those in traditional Medicare.
  • Badger: Twelve years after the founding of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, only 6 of more than 50 models it has tested have met de minimis measures of success (no increase in federal spending or diminution of quality).
  • Haislmaier: As the price to the patient for Medicare prescription drugs has been going up, what the drugmaker actually gets is going down.
  • Moffit: British NHS is failing: waiting lists are growing, ER wait times are rising, and access to primary care is falling.
  • Nina Schaefer: Biden EO on abortion is misleading and full of misinformation.
  • Moffit & Butcher: Teachers unions colluded with the White House and CDC officials to write federal guidance that kept schools closed.
    • +

    Covid Vaccine Makers Won’t Share Vaccines for Next-Gen Research

    Posted on by Devon Herrick

    In his Wednesday Links, John Goodman points to the question, Why aren’t we developing more nasal vaccines? This from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:

    Nasal vaccines are more likely to stop infection than vaccines injected into muscle because they stimulate mucosal immunity in the nose and respiratory system, the first line of attack, and they are likely to increase uptake especially among people with trypanophobia. Hence my longstanding call for an Operation Warp Speed for nasal vaccines. We haven’t got OWS 2.0 in the United States but nasal vaccines have recently been approved in China and India.

    +