- Date:
- 2014-03-25
- Main contributors:
- Gerd Gigerenzer
- Summary:
- In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block: an uninformed, anxious, noncompliant folk with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities, insist on unnecessary but expensive imaging, and may eventually turn into plaintiffs. Patients’ lack of health literacy has received much attention. But what about their physicians? I show that the majority of doctors are innumerate, that is, they do not understand basic health statistics. An estimated 70%–80% of them do not understand what the results of screening tests mean. This engenders superfluous treatment, anxiety, and healthcare costs. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream; both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. I argue that the problem is not simply in the minds of doctors, but in the way health statistics are framed in journals and brochures. A quick and efficient cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion. I report studies with doctors, medical students, and patients that show how transparent framing helps them understand health statistics in an hour or two. Raising taxes or rationing care is often seen as the only viable alternative to exploding health care costs. Yet there is a third option: by promoting health literacy, better care is possible for less money.
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- Date:
- 2021-11-09
- Main contributors:
- Frances Moore Lappé
- Summary:
- Frances Moore Lappé shares her journey from an awakening that led to the three-million-copy Diet for Small Planet in 1971. Starting with events triggering her to ask, “why hunger?”, she describes how this question led her to a life-long quest probing “the question behind the question.” She identifies both the progress in both understanding and partially realizing holistic solutions to food and hunger as well as shocking, backward motion worsening ecological destruction and human health. The actions she advocated in 1971 as positive choices are now absolute essentials, Lappé explains. Throughout she stresses the “power of ideas” guiding human action—how limiting ideas have trapped us on the wrong path as well as how a new, more holistic “story” is emerging. From courageous actions across the planet, some in surprising places, she identifies a positive remaking of our understanding of human capacities that can inspire our effective action.
- Date:
- 2011-11-10
- Main contributors:
- Ray Jackendoff
- Summary:
- This talk, based on Jackendoff's forthcoming book A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning, explores the experience of thought as inner speech, the Joycean stream of consciousness. The paradox is that thinking cannot be dependent on language, since (a) the same thought can be expressed in different languages, and (b) nonlinguistic organisms such as apes and babies do manage to think. He makes the case that thought itself is mostly unconscious, and that the conscious experience of inner speech is determined largely by the handles provided by the pronunciation linked to the thought. In addition, Professor Jackendoff will show that it is impossible to achieve the ideal of rational thinking, in which every step of reasoning is explicit, because the logical connections among statements ultimately rest on an intuitive (i.e. unconscious) judgment of conviction. He suggests that, nevertheless, the handles on thought provided by language enhance thought in important ways, and that a better ideal involves sensitivity to an appropriate balance between linguistically expressed rational reasoning and intuitive judgment.
- Date:
- 2016-12-14
- Main contributors:
- Slovic, Paul
- Summary:
- Studies of risk perception examine the judgments people make when they are asked to characterize and evaluate hazardous activities and technologies. This research aims to aid risk analysis and policymaking by (i) providing a basis for understanding and anticipating public responses to hazards and (ii) improving the communication of risk information among lay people, technical experts, and decision makers. This work assumes that those who promote and regulate health and safety need to understand how people think about and respond to risk. Without such understanding, well-intended policies may be ineffective. Among the questions the lecturer will address are: How do people think about risk? What factors determine the perception of risk and the acceptance of risk? What role do emotion and reason play in risk perception? What are some of the social and economic implications of risk perceptions? Along the way, he will address such topics as the subjective and value-laden nature of risk assessment; the multidimensionality of risk; sex, politics, and emotion in risk judgments; risk and trust; and risk perception and terrorism.
- Date:
- 2011-01-25
- Main contributors:
- Nancy Fraser
- Summary:
- The thought of Karl Polanyi can shed some much-needed critical light on the present crisis of neoliberalism. His 1944 book, The Great Transformation, traced a previous crisis of capitalism to efforts to commodify land, labor, and money. In Polanyi's view, it was the attempt to turn these three fundamental bases of human society into objects of exchange on self-regulating markets that triggered a crisis of multiple dimensions, not just economic and financial, but also ecological, social, and political. The effects were so destabilizing as to spark an ongoing counter-movement aimed at protecting society and nature from the ravages of the market. The end result was fascism and world war. Although developed for an earlier era, Polanyi's diagnosis is relevant today. Our crisis, too, can be fruitfully analyzed as a great transformation, in which a new round of efforts to commodify land, labor, and money is sparking a new round of counter-movements for social protection. Yet despite its evident merits, such an approach fails to capture the full range of social injustices and social struggles in contemporary capitalism. Thus, Polanyi's framework needs to be reconstructed in a form that is adequate for critical theorizing in the twenty-first century. In this lecture, Fraser will examine Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodification. After proposing a post-metaphysical reinterpretation of this concept, she will use it to analyze burgeoning markets in nature, reproductive labor, and finance as flashpoints of the current crisis of neoliberalism. The result will be a revised understanding of commodification that better grasps both the system dynamics and the normative deficits of contemporary capitalism.
- Date:
- 2013-04-02
- Main contributors:
- Sarah Hurdy
- Summary:
- Humans are remarkably similar to other apes. Like us, chimpanzees and orangutans are extremely clever, use tools and exhibit rudimentary understanding of causality and what others intend. However, other apes are not nearly as good at understanding the intentions of others nor nearly so eager to accommodate or help them. By contrast, right from an early age, humans are eager to help and share. It was this combination of understanding what others intend along with impulses to help and please them that enabled our ancestors to coordinate behavior in pursuit of common goals—with spectacular consequences later on. So how and why did such other-regarding capacities emerge in creatures as self-serving as non-human apes are? And why did they emerge in the line leading to the genus Homo, but not in other apes? In her lecture, Sarah Hrdy explains why she became convinced that the psychological and emotional underpinnings for these "other-regarding" impulses emerged very early in hominin evolution, as byproducts of shared parental and alloparental care and provisioning of young. According to widely accepted chronology, large-brained, anatomically modern humans evolved by 200,000 years ago, while behaviorally modern humans, capable of symbolic thought and language, evolved more recently still, in the last 150,000 or so years. But Hrdy hypothesizes that emotionally modern humans, interested in the mental and subjective states of others emerged far earlier, perhaps by the beginning of the Pleistocene 1.8 million years ago.
- Date:
- 2014-03-27
- Main contributors:
- Gerd Gigerenzer
- Summary:
- Whom to marry? How to invest? Whom to trust? Complex problems require complex solutions – so we might think. And if the solution doesn’t work, we make it more complex. That recipe is perfect for a world of known risks, but not for an uncertain world, as the failure of the complex forecasting methods leading to the 2008 financial crisis illustrates. In order to reduce estimation error, good inferences under uncertainty counter-intuitively require ignoring part of the available information,. Less can be more. Yet although we face high degrees of uncertainty on a daily basis, most of economics and cognitive science deals exclusively with lotteries and similar situations in which all risks are perfectly known or can be easily estimated. In this talk, I invite you to explore the land of uncertainty, where mathematical probability is of limited value and people rely instead on simple heuristics, that is, on rules of thumb. We meet Homo heuristicus, who has been disparaged by many psychologists as irrational for ignoring information—unlike the more diligent Homo economicus. In an uncertain world, however, simple heuristics can be a smart tool and lead to even better decisions than with what are considered rational strategies. The study of heuristics has three goals. The first is descriptive: to analyze the heuristics in the “adaptive toolbox” of an individual or an institution. The second goal is normative: to identify the ecological rationality of a given heuristic, that is, the structures of environments in which it succeeds and fails. The third goal is engineering: to design intuitive heuristics such as fast-and-frugal trees that help physicians make better decisions.