Lately, I’ve been noticing an epidemic of a certain kind of behaviour. I don’t think it’s an epidemic per se, just that I’m keyed into to noticing people who can’t see the big picture–thinking ‘meta’, I call it. The OED describes meta (which is a prefix for words) as meaning: beyond, about. Wikipedia tells me that metadata are data describing other data. A metatheory is a theory about another theory. Thinking ‘meta’ is thinking about your own thoughts and how they relate to others. Here are the people I’ve caught not thinking ‘meta’ recently.

Ok. This hasn’t happened recently, but is one of my favourite non-meta thoughts. When doctors read or hear about how accepting any kind of gifts from a pharmaceutical company can change their prescribing habits they always say, “I’m sure some doctors do that. Not me though. I can accept gifts without it affecting my practice.” Then you have to tell them about research demonstrating that even doctors who say that are biased by even small gifts.

Then there are the dentists from last week whom Dan Ariely had accused of being human and suffering from the same unconscious biases we all suffer from: ” I am a dedicated dentist who only does what is in the best interest of my clients. But, it is true that there are a few bad apples in dentistry, as they are everywhere.”

Then there are the medical researchers from that Atlantic article last week: “In a sense, he [Ioannidis] gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.”

Last night, I got to witness it in person. At a symposium with three great skeptics–Michael Shermer, David Gorski and Ben Goldacre–that was dedicated to fighting pseudoscience and included elaborate discussions of how people convince themselves of bad ideas, TWO people had the gall to get up in front of about 1,000 people and a few scattered video cameras and say that they agreed that there are a lot of crazy people out there, BUT they had a crazy idea that was actually true. One was about radio waves that cure cancer and the other was about JFK assassination conspiracy theories. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how you can think that way. I mean, how can you reject so many bad ideas and not recognize that your pet idea is in the same boat. I would never do that (sarcasm is tough to write).