Want More Policies Based on Evidence?

Mechanism Experiments and Policy Evaluations

Randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies. How can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes? We argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions, what we call "mechanism experiments." These types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested (or its setting) does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option.

Chris Beiser on Twitter / X

it'd be interesting to quantify the rate at which unaffiliated reddit users have improved on the state of the art for treatment protocols for diseases. my guess is that for 75% of diseases, they're responsible for a greater QoL increase than pharmaceutical companies over 10 years— Chris Beiser (@ctbeiser) June 7, 2021

What Can We Learn From the FDA Model for AI Regulation? - AI Now Institute

After holding a rapid deliberation late last year that convened deep experts on the FDA alongside key participants in the AI policy debate, we pulled together several immediate insights into a memo. Though it was clear the path forward isn’t to port over any single regulatory model wholesale, hosting a deep dive into the Food […]

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives. It's time for a new paradigm.

US Domestic Policy Dashboard - Impact Counter | Impact Counter

Explore US domestic policies and their impact on public health across all branches of government.

Less red tape, more pesticides? Bee careful what you ‘simplify’

Follow the Money - Platform for investigative journalism

Environmental epidemiology in a crossfire

Two tendencies have emerged in environmental epidemiology that hamper the translation of research findings into prevention of environmental hazards. One is the increased focus on highlighting weaknesses of epidemiology research that is clearly meant to explain away the research conclusions and weaken their possible implications for interventions to control environmental hazards. Another is the voluminous amount of information sharing that involves a substantial amount of misinformation, as part of the ongoing infodemic. In this light, the appearance of the catalogue of doubt-raising strategies, indeed the worst practices of scientific inference, is good news. Collected under the auspices of the International Network for Epidemiology in Policy, it serves to illustrate the range of possible (and impossible) forms of critique that may be raised on behalf of vested interests or other groups who for some reason disagree with the epidemiological conclusions. We believe that this systematic list will be useful in our field and help to identify critiques of policy options that are hidden and sometimes suppressed in weighing the epidemiological evidence.

Opinion | Treat Medicines Like Netflix Treats Shows (Published 2019)

Australia seems to have found a way to entice Big Pharma into making essential new medicines affordable. Why can’t the United States?

We live in a golden age of biology. So why are people still dying from disease? Because discovery and development move slower than they should. Today, we’re partnering with Incyte to change… | Samuel G. Rodriques | 491 comments

We live in a golden age of biology. So why are people still dying from disease? Because discovery and development move slower than they should. Today, we’re partnering with Incyte to change that. Kosmos is now the first agent that can compress months of drug development into weeks, from the earliest stages of scientific discovery through to FDA approval. Incyte will be the first company to deploy it across their pipeline. Work that used to take a team of scientists months now happens in weeks. Patients can't wait, and neither can we. | 491 comments on LinkedIn

The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have ...

Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value of Choice Architecture

Tens of millions of people are currently choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do not improve performance, and decision-makers do not realize that they are performing poorly. However, performance can be improved quite markedly by providing calculation aids, and by choosing a “smart” default. Implementing these psychologically based principles could save purchasers of policies and taxpayers approximately 10 billion dollars every year.

Le management « evidence-based » comme technique d’autodéfense intellectuelle

Et si le management, pour se débarrasser de son image pseudo-scientifique, devenait « evidence-based », à l’instar de la médecine ? Une transformation nécessaire, mais difficile à mettre en œuvre.

AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers

Analysis flags hundreds of studies that seem to follow a template, reporting correlations between complex health conditions and single variables based on publicly available data sets.

I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened.

America’s worst drug crisis shows what can happen when a dangerous, addictive substance is made easily accessible.

The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research

Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of these impacts to inform evidence-based technology policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefits. Unlike most other global-scale scientific challenges, however, the data necessary for scientific progress are generated and controlled by the same industry that might be subject to evidence-based regulation. Moreover, technology companies historically have been, and continue to be, a major source of funding for this field. These asymmetries in information and funding raise significant concerns about the potential for undue industry influence on the scientific record. In this Perspective, we explore how technology companies can influence our scientific understanding of their products. We argue that science faces unique challenges in the context of technology research that will require strengthening existing safeguards and constructing wholly new ones.