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> > They literally know nothing This entire article reads like someone only understand the field by reading clickbait headlines about nutrition (“Eggs are good

> > They literally know nothing This entire article reads like someone only understand the field by reading clickbait headlines about nutrition (“Eggs are good for you now”) and then assumes the scientists and journalists are one and the same. It also sets up a lot of straw man arguments that rationalists are likely to come up with but that you would hear from actual science, such as the idea that they’re searching for a rationally perfect diet. I don’t know what’s going on with that site but it’s not really a good resource. Identifying some areas where the science isn’t clear or where observations has changed and then trying to use that to dismiss an entire field is a classic anti-science trope used by people who prefer to feel superior to scientists and to downplay science. It’s most commonly used on topics like climate science or anti-vaccine research.

llm_nerd 3y ago
There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly. Only if one looks any deeper they find that the journalists printed the summary provided by the researchers. That they accurately captured the message the researchers were pushing. Researchers want eyeballs, and they want the funding that comes with attention, along with the personal prestige, and this has proven incredibly corrupting. Add that a pretty good percentage of nutrition research is funded by parties with deeply conflicted interests. In any case, the site is largely accurate. The nutrition field has made extraordinarily little progress. Right now, in 2023, pretty much the only solid nutrition conclusion is "don't eat too much. Eat a variety". Almost everything else does not stand any scrutiny at all. It seems entirely valid to dismiss the nutrition field given the past forty years. It's actually interesting watching a subreddit like /r/nutrition. The place could as easily be people discussing their healing crystals and chakras. That's where we're at right now.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  << we resort to blaming the journalists What is your point? Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? They certainly write the articles. They may even be a part of juicing up the headline sufficiently to become a perfect clickbait. Only few months ago, an article was written about recovering in 'no work' spaces, which happened to include cars. Fortune title? Scientists say car is your meditation spot ( I am paraphrasing a little since I am quoting from memory ).
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    >Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? When they're literally quoting almost verbatim the claims of the researchers, no they aren't to blame. And the vast majority of the time you see an article with some breathless claim, it is capturing the essence of the research summary, or the press release put out by the university or think tank. See, journalists like their jobs to be easy. They generally aren't spinning whole wool. As Graham's The Submarine describes, often they're basically reprinting something sent to them with minor wording changes. That's my point. And my point was amply clear in my original post. Blaming the journalists is often nonsensical sophistry. A hail mary to try to recover some semblance from busted research, as if it's the messenger who is to blame. The worst part is that the blame the journalist people create a vacuum in which even worse sources of information grow. Not sure the vaguely remembered, poorly communicated anecdote (which I can find zero references for) supports your point.
    - dcow 3y ago
      Welcome to HN! You will go far.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      << poorly communicated anecdote You do have a point. I feel vaguely attacked. See article[1]. Original title that you can still see in search engines, because it was only changed after pushback: >>You need to detach and 'psychologically recover' from work, professors say. The solution: commuting<< What I appear to be getting from your post is: 'No one is to blame. No one could be held liable for their actions. It is all sophistry.' Which is funny, because I am willing to agree the system has perverse incentives to mess with things at numerous checkpoints, but you cannot realistically claim this, because researchers ( and indeed all humans ) like their jobs easy as well. [1]https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/remote-work-why-do-i-miss-commuting-psychological-detach-recovery-liminal-space-management-study/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/remote-work-why-do-i-miss-com...
      - llm_nerd 3y ago
        That Fortune article was written by the authors of the study itself that they're quoting. The "study" itself was that some people find commutes meditative. I personally do. I'd rather work from home, but it's possible for both things to be true. I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science. Most observation / survey based science is junk science. Most "study of studies" research is junk science. It's lazy science to get media attention, and the more salacious or contrarian the outcome, the more appealing it is for some subset of researchers. This isn't an attack on science or scientists in the whole, clearly. But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly. The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies based on some past anecdotes. It's the exact same trick used by climate science deniers who go back and cherry pick some old studies where the conclusion changed: Pick some old studies where the conclusion changed, announce that science is fallible, then dismiss the entire field. It's ridiculous logic to anyone who understands how science works, but it's very appealing to people who like to be contrarian.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    "The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies" If they're observational or survey based studies, they should be dismissed generally, or at least given incredibly little attention. Even worse they're usually 2nd order "I took some terrible observational studies, put them in a pile, and now I have a study of studies" bit of bunk that is a bit like CDOs: Just layer the junk and pretend it has value all together. We have decades of doing this now to have learned that it is extremely low value, and simply repeating the same pattern again with new biases and assumptions is not going to improve the situation. Nutritional studies are really, really hard, short of creating concentration camps and assigning diets to sections for decades. If you were studying physics by doing a survey on what people's opinion of gravity is or what their recollection of their acceleration rates for the past year, you'd probably not have great results.
dkarl 3y ago
It's essentially making a scientific field responsible for delivering what people want from it. What people want from it is a collection of one weird tricks. They want good news. They want to hear that it's okay to eat as many donuts as you want, as long as you don't eat red meat, or that it's okay to eat red meat as long as you drink red wine, or that two kale smoothies per week will keep you "clean" of the "toxins" that cause overweight, depression, and shame about your work rival's kid going to a better college than yours. We've looked for those answers, and they don't exist. But the media has to deliver them anyway, so they do, and they cherry-pick and misinterpret studies to do so. Some attention-hungry researchers cater to them, and a lot of doctors with more ambition than shame try to get rich selling books and supplements. We're not limited by our nutritional knowledge anyway. When it comes to eating and health, we have much bigger problems to solve than the current nutritional unknowns. Most individual members of society suffer from ignorance and false beliefs that are way, way worse than the uncertainties and false results in nutritional science, and most people feel psychologically incapable of acting on what they think they know anyway. Any forces trying to educate and empower people are massively outgunned by shamelessly unprincipled hucksters filling the air with whatever noise they can sell on one hand and blatantly evil food industry marketing on the other.
astrange 3y ago
Nutrition science doesn't deserve credit yet. Maybe if they hadn't spent decades putting "heart healthy low fat" on food made entirely out of sugar and telling parents the optimal kid breakfast was a bowl of cereal and orange juice. US nutrition advice is basically just a contest in how many carbs you can eat.

llm_nerd 3y ago

There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly. Only if one looks any deeper they find that the journalists printed the summary provided by the researchers. That they accurately captured the message the researchers were pushing. Researchers want eyeballs, and they want the funding that comes with attention, along with the personal prestige, and this has proven incredibly corrupting. Add that a pretty good percentage of nutrition research is funded by parties with deeply conflicted interests. In any case, the site is largely accurate. The nutrition field has made extraordinarily little progress. Right now, in 2023, pretty much the only solid nutrition conclusion is "don't eat too much. Eat a variety". Almost everything else does not stand any scrutiny at all. It seems entirely valid to dismiss the nutrition field given the past forty years. It's actually interesting watching a subreddit like /r/nutrition. The place could as easily be people discussing their healing crystals and chakras. That's where we're at right now.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
<< we resort to blaming the journalists What is your point? Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? They certainly write the articles. They may even be a part of juicing up the headline sufficiently to become a perfect clickbait. Only few months ago, an article was written about recovering in 'no work' spaces, which happened to include cars. Fortune title? Scientists say car is your meditation spot ( I am paraphrasing a little since I am quoting from memory ).
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  >Are you suggesting that they are not to blame? When they're literally quoting almost verbatim the claims of the researchers, no they aren't to blame. And the vast majority of the time you see an article with some breathless claim, it is capturing the essence of the research summary, or the press release put out by the university or think tank. See, journalists like their jobs to be easy. They generally aren't spinning whole wool. As Graham's The Submarine describes, often they're basically reprinting something sent to them with minor wording changes. That's my point. And my point was amply clear in my original post. Blaming the journalists is often nonsensical sophistry. A hail mary to try to recover some semblance from busted research, as if it's the messenger who is to blame. The worst part is that the blame the journalist people create a vacuum in which even worse sources of information grow. Not sure the vaguely remembered, poorly communicated anecdote (which I can find zero references for) supports your point.
  - dcow 3y ago
    Welcome to HN! You will go far.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    << poorly communicated anecdote You do have a point. I feel vaguely attacked. See article[1]. Original title that you can still see in search engines, because it was only changed after pushback: >>You need to detach and 'psychologically recover' from work, professors say. The solution: commuting<< What I appear to be getting from your post is: 'No one is to blame. No one could be held liable for their actions. It is all sophistry.' Which is funny, because I am willing to agree the system has perverse incentives to mess with things at numerous checkpoints, but you cannot realistically claim this, because researchers ( and indeed all humans ) like their jobs easy as well. [1]https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/remote-work-why-do-i-miss-commuting-psychological-detach-recovery-liminal-space-management-study/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/remote-work-why-do-i-miss-com...
    - llm_nerd 3y ago
      That Fortune article was written by the authors of the study itself that they're quoting. The "study" itself was that some people find commutes meditative. I personally do. I'd rather work from home, but it's possible for both things to be true. I am quite specifically hanging the blame on researchers who are perpetrating junk science. Most observation / survey based science is junk science. Most "study of studies" research is junk science. It's lazy science to get media attention, and the more salacious or contrarian the outcome, the more appealing it is for some subset of researchers. This isn't an attack on science or scientists in the whole, clearly. But when you see some breathless article exclaiming that eating an olive pit twice weekly makes you live twenty years longer, blaming the columnists seems foolish. In almost every case they're simply repeating the claims of bad science.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> There is a growing trend that when research doesn't hold up (especially in regards to its significance/magnitude/importance), we resort to blaming the journalists who printed the article hyping it. That is seen on here constantly. The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies based on some past anecdotes. It's the exact same trick used by climate science deniers who go back and cherry pick some old studies where the conclusion changed: Pick some old studies where the conclusion changed, announce that science is fallible, then dismiss the entire field. It's ridiculous logic to anyone who understands how science works, but it's very appealing to people who like to be contrarian.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  "The parent comment is trying to dismiss an entire field and also preemptively dismiss new studies" If they're observational or survey based studies, they should be dismissed generally, or at least given incredibly little attention. Even worse they're usually 2nd order "I took some terrible observational studies, put them in a pile, and now I have a study of studies" bit of bunk that is a bit like CDOs: Just layer the junk and pretend it has value all together. We have decades of doing this now to have learned that it is extremely low value, and simply repeating the same pattern again with new biases and assumptions is not going to improve the situation. Nutritional studies are really, really hard, short of creating concentration camps and assigning diets to sections for decades. If you were studying physics by doing a survey on what people's opinion of gravity is or what their recollection of their acceleration rates for the past year, you'd probably not have great results.

dkarl 3y ago

It's essentially making a scientific field responsible for delivering what people want from it. What people want from it is a collection of one weird tricks. They want good news. They want to hear that it's okay to eat as many donuts as you want, as long as you don't eat red meat, or that it's okay to eat red meat as long as you drink red wine, or that two kale smoothies per week will keep you "clean" of the "toxins" that cause overweight, depression, and shame about your work rival's kid going to a better college than yours. We've looked for those answers, and they don't exist. But the media has to deliver them anyway, so they do, and they cherry-pick and misinterpret studies to do so. Some attention-hungry researchers cater to them, and a lot of doctors with more ambition than shame try to get rich selling books and supplements. We're not limited by our nutritional knowledge anyway. When it comes to eating and health, we have much bigger problems to solve than the current nutritional unknowns. Most individual members of society suffer from ignorance and false beliefs that are way, way worse than the uncertainties and false results in nutritional science, and most people feel psychologically incapable of acting on what they think they know anyway. Any forces trying to educate and empower people are massively outgunned by shamelessly unprincipled hucksters filling the air with whatever noise they can sell on one hand and blatantly evil food industry marketing on the other.

astrange 3y ago

Nutrition science doesn't deserve credit yet. Maybe if they hadn't spent decades putting "heart healthy low fat" on food made entirely out of sugar and telling parents the optimal kid breakfast was a bowl of cereal and orange juice. US nutrition advice is basically just a contest in how many carbs you can eat.