4 ms·
Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we he
by crusso 13y ago
Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed
This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.
It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.
- sparkie 13y agoI see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science". Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (although little of it gets into established journals). There's no such thing as "settled science", and the term alone should set alarm bells ringing.
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- sparkie 13y agoOf course, it's always easier to bury dissenting views - it makes it look like there's a "consensus".
- eropple 13y agoPeer reviewed denialist science? Links please. (And this isn't a joke--I very much want to read this, but it looks like downvotes are easier than substantiating.)
- pdonis 13y agohttp://nipccreport.org/ http://nipccreport.org/ Note that "denialist" is a very broad (not to say loaded) term. A better term would be: skeptical of the claimed "consensus" that we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, even if the economic costs are huge, or else the planet is doomed.
- eropple 13y agoI'm sorry, maybe I was unclear. I'm talking about peer-reviewed work (which the NIPCC stuff is not) that is being trumpeted by people who are, like, not being funded by a libertarian think tank. I mean, NIPCC is bankrolled by the Heartland Institute (a Cato-alike wishcasting group) and two advocacy groups that won't reveal their funding, one of which was headed by Fred Singer (who to this day is trying desperately to make people think that the University of East Anglia emails are actually a thing). I wanted to give you a chance to show me something I hadn't seen before, on the off chance that maybe somebody, somewhere, was actually doing intellectually defensible work that wasn't being publicized...and you bilged it by bringing up the same utterly discredited junk that's in the denialist toolbox. I mean, you do realize why it's named the NIPCC, right? It's named that to confuse people with the IPCC, an actual scientific organization that does not lead off their papers with statements about how politically independent they are. The mindset that compels one to the false equivalency you are choosing to employ between a policy group's own paid-for studies and the peer review process of, like, actual science is exactly why I use the term "denialist". (For folks interested in a pretty good rundown of exactly why I and folks who pay attention to this may react in this manner towards the NIPCC, I recommend this as a great summary: http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/09/heartland-institute-nipcc-fail-the-credibility-test/ http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/09/heartland-inst... )
- 13y ago