TED Community » Marya Zilberberg

More About Me

I'm passionate about

I am passionate about learning. My mission is to facilitate understanding of how to access, assess and utilize knowledge in healthcare.

An idea worth spreading

The human mind is prone to making subconscious shortcuts that most of the time serve us well, but sometimes can get us into a whole lot of trouble. These shortcuts originate from our proneness to stereotyping. It is an adaptation that is useful for evading predators, but not for making decisions in our current information-saturated age. In healthcare these errors are particularly pernicious, as they result in poor individual and public health outcomes. It seems that many current conversations in healthcare are driven by these erroneous shortcuts. In my work I uncover these errors in thinking and explain how rational decision techniques can help avoid these traps and change the conversation. And although I am focused mostly in healthcare, these techniques can be applied to the rest of our lives.

Talk to me about

Talk to me about anything to do with knowledge, thinking and decisions. Or epidemiology, outcomes, clinical research.

People don't know that I'm good at

I also write short short fiction, and one of my stories was recently chosen as a runner up in a competition (you can find it here: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/818)

Comments

• TEDCred score: +0.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Conversation: We Do Not Know Anything!

  Feb 4 2012: This is a fascinating insight -- I often wonder, what do we really know? In fact everything we "know" is really a code, a mental model for what is really going on. Insofar as the model fits what we perceive to be reality, it is a good model. Once it stops fitting, it must be dumped for an alternative explanation. It is the way of knowledge acquisition. But so much has to do with our tools, cognitive and created...

• A reply on Conversation: "100,000 Americans every year" = A fatal crash of an Airbus A380 every other day. Would you fly if that was the safety record of aviation?

  Feb 4 2012: Ryan this is true only in serious or life-threatening situations. However, most of medicine today is about tweaking stuff (think all the "pre" conditions that are treated in essentially healthy individuals with drugs and procedures that have adverse consequences) and screening for disease that may or may not impact us in the long run. We do not have a very good idea of how much harm is caused by all of these interventions that are either marginally necessary or outright unnecessary.
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: How immune should science be from the political environment of its time?

  Feb 4 2012: Great question and some great answers and points made! There are a couple of ideas that I want to float. First, science, just like anything else cognitive, cannot be divorced from our preconceptions. There are cognitive biases that we all have, and it is very difficult to disentangle ourselves from their web. Yes, even scientists come at their science with these biases, and more often that not they just get propagated. It is nearly impossible to publish anything that diverges from the narrow path of the current dogma for this very reason. On the other hand, stuff that is radical should be scrutinized more closely. It is this tight rope that we all walk in science, and I contend that we all fall victim to bias and conflict. But should science really be elevated above all other modes of thought? This seems short-sighted, as the human brain requires a great variety of inputs to think well. Furthermore, a national and global conversation that is needed about how to advance our knowledge cannot and should not be limited to science alone. There should be no hierarchy in how we approach learning -- humanities, social sciences, music, science, and yes, even religion, all give context to what we learn. Finally, someone asked what science is. To me the best way to answer is by referring to Karl Popper, who defined scientific questions as those questions that are disprovable.