7 ms·

Good article, but there's one thing that really bothers me: > perhaps because of his serious and scientific background – he has a physics degree from Harvard a

• shermantanktop 3y ago
  It's like some kind of Gell-Mann effect corollary. Scientists and other educated experts quoted in a newspaper carry automatic authority unless you understand the target field well enough. But if you do, you realize they are no more trustworthy than a guy on the bus. Titles don't help. An "environmental engineer" might not have sufficient knowledge about zoology or bridges to support whatever they are talking about, but a layperson might not realize that.
  • nhinck2 3y ago
    Coined as mann-gell if I'm remembering this video correctly. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0
  • sph 3y ago
    The Gell-Mann effect overrates having an academic degree and doesn't count the fact that people might become experts in something they haven't done formal studies for. How can you tell whether I am as trustworthy as a guy on the bus on matters of software engineering? I am a high school dropout. Likewise, I'm no medical doctor, but knowledge is a spectrum, and I believe I know more than the average Joe on matters of nutrition because it is something that fascinates me and I've read and researched a lot about. Given that I've read and heard about Taubes for 15 years, it is simplistic to say the least that he doesn't know anything because he's got a physics background. tl;dr: the Gell-Mann effect only makes sense in a vacuum and if you really want to believe that having a degree automatically makes you an expert with worthwhile ideas.
    • shermantanktop 3y ago
      The effect here is more about people claiming lateral authority, rather than the base claim of authority in the first point. But I take your point. I’m also underqualified for my position and am wary of credentialism. But if I’m looking at a topic I don’t know well — e.g. seismic building codes- I have to start somewhere. Software engineering is thankfully a field that is particularly accessible to people without formal training. Demand is high, functional skills can be proven on the spot, and employers are (usually) not in a position where their hiring decisions have potential legal consequences.
• Johanx64 3y ago
  Bollocks, physics is an actual scientific field and aerospace engineering is actual engineering (compared to say "software engineering" where it's engineering in name only), similarly there's barely anything scientific in the "nutritional science". If you have a real scientific background and real engineering background you are way more likely to do a proper job. It frustrates me that people think nutritional "science" is a serious scientific field. And that the "nutritional scientist" is somehow better equipped - they have barely done any real science a single day in their life.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    So what makes you an authority in defining what’s a scientific field? Care to share some actual data?
    • airtonix 3y ago
      [dead]
    • nradov 3y ago
      You don't need to be an authority to see how the majority of human nutrition science is barely a step above junk. Pick any journal in the field and go through the last few issues. You'll mostly find observational studies with subject reported data (known to be inaccurate). Very few long, term randomized controlled trials with meaningful endpoints.
      • paulpauper 3y ago
        It is worse than junk. most junk science is harmless, but bad diet advice can hurt your health.
    • oldgradstudent 3y ago
      If you can rigorously test your hypotheses in an experiment, it is a scientific field. If you can't, or won't, it is not a scientific field.
• paulpauper 3y ago
  Exactly. I don't think his guess is any better than any else given the poor track record of the dieting industry overall. He made a lucrative career by latching on to a theory, that like virtually all diet fads, falls short when applied to real people in a controlled setting. No one has any idea which diet (if any) is best, or the connection between insulin and obesity, or if fats are good or not, etc. All hunches. Carbs have been falling out of favor for a while now but obesity getting worse.
  • DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    Idk Ive been a keto acolyte for a long time and anyone who Ive ever known that did the diet was wildly successful on it. So his claims really dont seem to fall short in my own experience and the experience of people I know.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    The problem with anecdotes is that they're not science. And as there is wide variety in humans this is very much a case of ymmv. Anecdotally, my wife went onto a low-carb diet 18 months ago. She likes low carb food, and isn't a huge fan of bread, potatoes etc anyway, so it was easy. She's not total though, still eats a rusk at breakfast, and has a (home made) pizza once a week. She also started exercising a lot more, and found a sustainable rhythm for that. She's lost 50 lbs. (Around 25kg). Interestingly, her blood sugar levels have not dropped significantly, but they did drop a bit. I sporadically do low-carb, and always lose weight doing so. I like bread, potato's, rice though so my diet is much less obsessive. My results are more fluctuating but slowly trending down. I'm in no rush, but eould like to drop around 15 lbs this year. I lose about 1lb per week if I'm "fairly strict" - exercise levels don't change (I exercise a reasonable amount.) Incidentally, I've found that just slowly reducing quantity has helped as well. Eating from small bowls and plates has helped me. None of this is data. And I still "cheat" (I'll happily eat normal in social situations, and often on weekends etc) but I seem to have found a pattern I can maintain long term. It's a "diet" in the sense there's good and bad, but its also "lifestyle" in the sense that I try to be "moderate" with the bad.
• deleted 3y ago
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• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Science isn't the memorization of facts. To graduate from Harvard, you must actually understand how to do science at a high level. Many of those skills transfer between subjects. Having a physics degree might not make you a great biologist, but it's also not nothing.
• jandrewrogers 3y ago
  It kind of is a serious background. The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. What the domain specialists have is familiarity with the existing literature, but that is readily remedied as anyone with an interest and motivation can become familiar with literature like nutrition science in short order. All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. I have seen far too much sloppy and motivated reasoning in the soft sciences to trust anything that comes from people that exclusively live in that world. I am sure there are proper scientists in those fields doing good work, but that isn’t the average. I don’t know anything about this particular case, but it is much easier for someone with mastery of the hard sciences to become fluent in the soft sciences out of interest than vice versa. It may not be fair but I have seen so many real world examples of this, where hard science/engineering experts became recognized experts in softer science fields entirely out of interest, but never in the reverse, that it is difficult to ignore.
  • edanm 3y ago
    > The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. That doesn't make them better or worse, just different. > All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. You are, IMO, too dismissive in your language about entire professions. "Shallow, soft sciences". I get where you're coming from - I'm more of a CS/Math/Physics person myself. But I think "our" side of hard sciences is far more dismissive than it should be - leading to implicitly trusting people who wave the right "hard science" credentials around instead of people working on the field for many years.
• a11r 3y ago
  Gary Taubes has written multiple scholarly books on the subject. He has won the Science in Society Journalism Award of the National Association of Science Writers three times. I think a training in one scientific field does qualify a person to go spend their time digging into other fields. How well they do is a matter of personal ability and effort and one would have to read their output and judge for oneself. I have read many of Taubes's book and many of the papers cited in his books and have concluded that he is a well qualified expert in the field.
  • master234 3y ago
    [dead]
• huytersd 3y ago
  Not true. The fact that he was able to get through two rigorous programs at prestigious universities with low acceptance rates automatically gives him a certain amount of credence.
  • TrackerFF 3y ago
    Well, if it came to nutritional or health advice, would you give Trump more credence, over some random person from a state school? After all, Trump is a Wharton graduate.
    • huytersd 3y ago
      I guess there are considerations to be made for nepo babies you know paid their way in but that’s not most people.
• deleted 3y ago
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