It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Intuition often holds more significance than conventional testing methods in understanding complex phenomena.
Siddhartha Mukherjee emphasizes the power of intuition over standard tests in research, suggesting that while normal outcomes can provide rules, it is the exceptions and outliers that reveal deeper truths or laws of nature. He argues that personal biases in medical experiments are inevitable, thus highlighting the interplay between objective testing and subjective experience in understanding human health.
Themes
IntuitionTestingScienceExperimentsBias
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on medical research methods, this quote can illustrate the importance of recognizing personal biases.
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It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.
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