2 ms·

We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science". There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a mea

We're far too generous with what we allow to be called "science". There is no dietary research, because you can't pull off an unbiased dietary study over a meaningful period of time. Practical and ethical problems abound. Maybe one day we can simulate n=10mm people from the neck down for a period of 30 years, and feed half of them bacon and half of them beans, but even that will have the major problems of being a simulation and that only from the neck down. Read the original "fat = heart attacks" studies by Ancel Keys from the 1950's. I've done free online 5-minute long data science tutorials with more statistical rigor.

_dark_matter_ 2y ago
There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
- FredPret 2y ago
  OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology. The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems. Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about. I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and maths

_dark_matter_ 2y ago

There are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.

FredPret 2y ago
OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology. The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems. Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  It sounds like your describing models. Yes we have small models. Yes we have big models. We have rat models, we have matching models, we have twin models. We have lots of models I don't know about. I'm not sure what you're getting at. These models get better, our understanding is improved, and we will slowly uncover more truths. We already have so much more knowledge about nutrition than we did 100 years ago.
ttoinou 2y ago
Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and maths