"And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to g

"And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong." I think you misunderstand what he means when he says "listen to your grandmother". He is talking specifically about time tested heuristics that have survived a for thousands of years - memes that competed, and won. The best example I can think of is fasting: this is a tradition that appears to be very well preserved among all of the worlds religions and advocated by all of the worlds great thinkers - from the ancient greeks to Christ to Muhammad. And now in 2016 we're figuring out what a great idea it is from the perspective of "science". Those are the kind of "grandmother was right" insights that he is guiding us towards, as opposed to (for instance) the more modern "eat little snacks all day long" which is probably a disaster from an insulin response / oxidative stress standpoint. That's the junk message from no-skin-in-the-game authorities. Caveats: If your grandmother is in the United States, like mine is/was/are, they never followed this heuristic and instead took the eating schedules of the pioneer farmers (three squares a day!) into the urban environment with disastrous health consequences.