Unpacking the biases that shape our beliefs | Mike Hartmann | TEDxStJohns

Years ago I was walking through Avalon Malo while Christmas shopping with my wife when I suddenly had a blinding migraine and felt a pain on the right side of my hand and my foot went completely numb, so after a quick trip. to the emergency room a CT scan and an MRI a lumbar puncture later I was told I had multiple sclerosis I thought my life was over I thought I would be in a wheelchair within a year I knew, like many people, what I did? Did I turn to Google to confirm my fears more precisely? I actually went to Google Images and searched for more wheelchair and sure enough, I found hundreds of results of people with MS who are confined to wheelchairs, so that was it for me. all the evidence I needed now talking about evidence these are the actual levels of evidence that we use in science and in medicine some of you may recognize it we call it the evidence pyramid I think just to make it sound a little cooler at the bottom we have things like expert opinion and as we move up we get into things like randomized control trials, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, it's basically what we use to judge whether evidence or research is low or high quality and as we move up in the pyramid.

We basically go from opinion to fact, but lately it seems like we're ignoring the whole pyramid and instead trusting a real genius or a person who we think knows everything and our pyramid is actually starting to look a little more like this. I know. We'll call this the "just be" principle. I only know I got the flu from the flu shot, even though we know you can't get the flu from the flu shot, or I just know I got sick because I went out in the rain. without my coat even though we know that it is viruses and bacteria that make us sick and not the weather or hell.

I just knew I would end up in a wheelchair, so after my Google Images search that day, the scientific part of me, the epidemiologist in me, urges me. He asked me to dig a little deeper, so I did and I did a little more research online some more reputable sites and actually, maybe you know, I talked to the MS Society about it and found out that no, most likely It's just that I wouldn't be in a wheelchair. I'm very lucky, the certain type of MS I have is rarely debilitating, only a certain percentage even progresses to the next stage of the disease and an even smaller percentage of that group ends up in a wheelchair, so how did I get there ?

How do we get there? So how do we get to the point where we believe things with such conviction when the evidence points in the opposite direction? So to unravel the just know principle, we need to come to terms with something I like to call intrinsic bias. Intrinsic bias is what underlies it. Any of us simply knowing something allows us to go from hearing an anecdote or hearing a story and make this leap from well, I heard that happened to one person, so that must happen to all people all the time and we begin to believe that.

The plural of anecdote is data when in reality it is not. What exactly is intrinsic bias? Intrinsic bias is something that goes to our core, its bias is

shape

d by our culture, our religion, the environment, the political environment or the economic situation we were in. posed, we could call it things like well-intentioned bias or fear-based bias, it's well-intentioned bias, for example, I think it's safe to say that everyone believes in being healthy, everyone wants to be healthy, but everyone has a slightly different idea of what it is. Being healthy actually means I have a daughter. I love her so much.

I want him to be healthy. Does that mean I should vaccinate her? Does it mean I should vaccinate her? Does it mean I should wake her up every morning and feed her vitamins and supplements and minerals if she and my whole family became vegetarian and gluten free, but my grandfather ate Jiggs dinner every Sunday of his salt meat filled life and lived to be a hundred years, so let's look at that, let's look at the principle of just know because I think now more than ever we tend to discard any evidence that goes against our preconceptions and we gather and treasure and most importantly believe any information that supports our sifted ideas, we selectively consume this enormous amount of information that exists, whether it is good or not. bad and what makes it bad is nothing intrinsically bad, which I would like to believe, but rather that bad information is simply based on bad data, so let's run through a couple of quick epidemiological style exercises and do some super math calculations fun that everyone loves.

Alright, a few years ago there was an outbreak of whooping cough, also known as whooping cough, in an elementary school in the United States and after the outbreak, these are three different headlines that appeared in seventy-seven percent of the cases in whooping cough outbreaks. they were fully vaccinated now this is a headline that a Facebook friend of mine shared he didn't read the article he read the headline and based on the headline he just knew vaccines are bad and he was going to share this headline on Mac native kids They quintupled. risk of getting whooping cough now, this is a headline that another friend of mine shared and actually gave my other friend quite a shout because he read this headline and knew that vaccines are the only way forward.

Fortezza celebrates in primary school with a high vaccination rate. Now this is the headline that I read and I knew based on this headline that I was going to have to read the real story and get to the facts behind the case, so here they are, there were 208 elementary school students in this school and 195 of were fully vaccinated against whooping cough, 13 of them were not, there were thirty-five cases of whooping cough in the outbreak, 27 of the 35 children were in the fully vaccinated group and eight of them were in the unvaccinated group, so let's go back to those three starters. and we will separate them, we will separate their intrinsic

biases

and we will separate their "just know" mentalities the first, seventy-seven percent of the cases in the whooping cough outbreak were fully vaccinated.

This is one that came from the anti-vaccine website. Now the first thing we must ask ourselves is if this headline is true. Yes, technically it is true. Twenty-seven of the thirty-five children who became ill were vaccinated, which is seventy-seven percent, although it does not tell us the whole story of the unvaccinated. children were five times more at risk of getting whooping cough this is from a pro vaccine website again is this true? Yes, technically this is true too. We know that 27 out of 195 vaccinated children got sick, which is about 14%, and we know that 8 out of 13 unvaccinated children also got sick, which is about 62%.

Now the authors of this article got a little clever and sneaky with their statistics. I won't go into that, I won't bore you with it, but they had to do some clever rounding and they left out certain kids to get this 5x risk number and all it shows is that the pro vaccine side and the pro science side we are not immune to the intrinsic bias that we are not immune to. just know mentality, in the same way that the anti-vaccine website left out the fact that unvaccinated children were much more likely to get sick during the whooping cough outbreak at a high-vaccination elementary school, so that this is the headline I read and again it is true, yes, technically this is true. 195 of the 208 at this school were fully vaccinated, giving us a 94 percent coverage rate, which I think most people would agree is a very high vaccination rate, so each one of these three headlines when you read them. you can see how their intrinsic bias and "just know" feeling manifests itself, whether it's a pro vaccine or seemingly trying to be neutral now, sometimes intrinsic bias can be a little more sinister, a something more devious, we'll call it bias with an agenda.

We see this a lot in alternative health and we see it a lot in politics, for example, this is a graph that Fox News published that shows the extent to which the Obama administration is a way to meet its Obama care enrollment goal if look closely. the graph I think is pretty obvious you can see there's something a little off maybe the scale is a little off now here's the correct graph that Fox News and its affiliates had to air the next day along with a sorry I think it obviously shows much more accurately the actual numbers, but that's just a small example of how I know it can go from simple to just not or we just know it and everyone should know it too.

It's biased with an agenda now what I just know can change this is the good news. I bet everyone here has changed something they believe in more recently than they think, just with something small, something where the stakes are low, for example, I used to argue with my wife all the time that Amy Adams was married to the boy who played Borat. I would swear up and down this was true. I just knew and finally one day I guess I'd had enough and pulled up the Amy Adams bio on IMDB and showed me that Amy Adams is gone.

He's not married to the guy who plays Borat, in fact he's married to someone named Isla Fisher who, in my defense, I think looks a lot like Amy Adams and in fact, as I watch this now, I can honestly say that she actually I would not do it. I don't know which is which, but the point is that I had to believe that I had something that I knew was true. I was shown evidence to the contrary and based on that evidence I changed my belief, so why can't we do that with the most important things, why can't we do that with the health and medical things?

The challenge that we have and the challenge that we face is that we must be willing to see our own

biases

and try to see beyond them, we must be willing to put these biases and put our preconceptions in front of real, solid evidence and if it doesn't hold up that evidence, change them and speaking of change, I think if we want to change the levels of the evidence pyramid that I showed before, I think this is the only real way we should do it thank you very much