ALS: Derek Angus

February 24 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EST

Title: The RCT is dead.  Long live the RCT.

Abstract:

First introduced in the 1940s, the randomized clinical trial, or RCT, revolutionized medicine. Today, all new therapies must show efficacy in an RCT to gain regulatory approval, fueling a clinical trials industry of over $50 billion per year. Although deemed essential, RCTs have considerable statistical, logistical, and ethical challenges. There are some solutions, but few have been adopted. Consequently, RCT design and execution remains largely unchanged in decades, and increasingly anachronistic. I will discuss some of the challenges with RCTs, review some solutions ushered in by necessity during COVID, and consider some next steps. Some key themes I will discuss include frequentist versus Bayesian inference, heterogeneity of treatment effect, use of adaptive platform designs, the implications of digitized health records, and whether and how clinical care should be fused with knowledge generation under conditions of uncertainty.

This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.

LTT: John Michael

February 28 @ 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm EST

Title: The Sense of Commitment in Joint Action: Towards a Comparative Perspective

Abstract: Recent research provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist in performing actions which their joint action partners are expecting and may be relying on them to perform. I will provide an overview of this research and discuss its implications for philosophical discussions about the normativity of joint action. I will also present a new line of research investigating individual and cultural differences with respect to the sense of commitment and offer some reflections about what we can infer from these differences.

This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.