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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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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Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer.
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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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