Blog Introduction

I am a lifelong student of philosophy, history, science, and anything else that catches my interest. I graduated from college recently, am currently underemployed, and am applying to medical school. I've always had two main goals in life: to learn as much as I can and to accomplish something great, something that will outlast me. Medicine provides the opportunity to do both. I'm incredibly fortunate to live in an era of scientific medicine, and I want to contribute something meaningful to my field.

I'm especially interested in learning more about the statistical methods used in clinical research, as well as the logistics of clinical trials. I worry about the creeping influence of unscientific practices in medicine, both from “alternative medicine” on the outside and stubborn doctors from the inside. As a wise doctor once told me, “There is nothing more dangerous to medicine than a doctor whose certainty is not in proportion to the evidence, who dismisses without reading or accepts despite all his reading.”

Philosophically, I'm interested in formal logic, ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know (or what we think we know), and is the foundation of scientific inquiry. Scientifically, I'm interested primarily in biological topics and the process of science in general. Evolution is the backbone of biology, and I don't think it's possible to understand biology without it any more than one could understand organic chemistry without VSEPR theory, or geology without the mafic to felsic gradient. You can memorize facts of biology without evolution, but you cannot learn biology without it.

Over the past year I've refined and collected my thoughts on these issues, along with several others that interest me, and I now possess a handful of notes that I will edit into essays and post here every few days.