OPRAH'S A BAD DOCTOR

Check out the current issue of Newsweek. The magazine takes on the Goddess of all quack medicine, Oprah Winfrey. Wow, Newsweek’s got balls!

Celebrities get to where they are by wearing blinders. They must have the ability to ignore other people’s opinions. To succeed in Hollywood (along with a mountain of luck) you have to have persistence. Persistence entails the ability to ignore everyone who doesn’t agree with you.

You must ignore critics who question your ability (that is to say the people criticizing the methodology by which you do things). You must ignore friends that might tell you it’s time to give up this acting thing and get a real job (that is not accepting results). And you must ignore odds that tell you your chances of succeeding are one in a million, (that means you must be bad at math). All those qualities that make for a successful celebrity make for a lousy scientist.

A good scientist (or doctor) should listen to his or her critics. If others can show a scientist’s methodology is wrong then that scientist needs to change tactics. He or she cannot ignore evidence. Evidence is a scientist’s bread and butter (or beaker and bunsen burner if you will). They must go were the evidence leads. That means they should move on if the evidence says so. A good scientist doesn’t ignore results that contradict what they were setting out to prove, they embrace those results. They might even publish those results. Can you imagine a celebrity wanting to publish their bad reviews?

And, lastly most scientist are good at math.

This all might seem anti-intuitive to becoming successful. It goes against everything Dr. Phil has told us. Sorry, that’s the way science works. I know Oprah fans might hunt me down for saying the following, but here it goes: Don’t take medical advice from Oprah! Oprah is a very successful celebrity, but she’s a really bad scientist and an even worse doctor.