> I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9

> I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. Attacking writers (to no disagreement from me) is a pretty odd response to a defense of science's role in society. Science coverage is garbage, but that has approximately nothing to do with your point, nor my response to it. > No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. Oh for the love of God, this is a masterpiece of pedantry. You're mistaking "I assume everyone here is intelligent enough to understand what I'm getting at despite my lack of precision in a brief three-sentence comment" for "I don't understand what I'm talking about". Just because you don't fit the former statement doesn't mean I fit the latter.