Medical science is getting more and more like math. There’s big data to parse, genes to sequence, neural networks to model. That means doctors and patients will be receiving less advice and more menus of probability ranges — the kind of information that tends to turn the human mind to mush.
Studies going back to psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s work in the 1970s and ’80s show that even doctors tend to misunderstand probabilities, especially as they apply to risk. That’s a problem but not an insoluble one. Intuition can be retrained. People can learn to look at uncertainty in a different way.
