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Science’s Biggest Fail

• hga 12y ago
  Two nits: I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don't get a deficiency disease. I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day, because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either. I don't know about "crazy-large" amounts (and too water much will kill you), but as far as I know, plus a little bit of time with Google just now, which indicates this has been the "scientific consensus" since the time of Hippocrates, unless you drink a fair amount, you're setting yourself up for kidney stones. Which I can attest are no fun at all.
  • FreezerburnV 12y ago
    One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don't get a deficiency disease. And yet, what has started to come out (from what I understand and have read) is that taking a straight up multivitamin or something isn't that helpful. The general reason people seem to be finding being that the body doesn't absorb the stuff in the pill you just took very well, meaning you really aren't getting much benefit, if any, from taking said pill. Instead you would actually want to eat things that give you the vitamins and minerals that the body needs in order for it to be able to absorb those. Possibly including something such as a healthy fat which would promote absorbing the good things in stuff such as broccoli that much more. (again, from what I have read and understand) This is the possible reasoning behind the article saying taking multivitamins is marketing.
    • hga 12y ago
      You don't need "much benefit" if the purpose is to avoid a deficiency disease, unless you're eating a really exotic diet (or have an absorption disease, but that's not in the remit of once-a-day vitamins), it's just to "top off" your normal diet. Especially since they come with instructions to take them with food to improve absorption. Any specifics on this claimed problem? Like some interacting with others, or with various foods?
    • TillE 12y ago
      I'm not sure what specifically you could be referring to. In fact, for vegans it can be easier to sometimes take supplements that have iron and vitamin C in one package, rather than carefully preparing a meal so that you're eating both plant-derived iron and vitamin C at roughly the same time.
      • brianwawok 12y ago
        Maybe the fact that a pill is needed to balance out a given diet, shows that you are using a given diet that the human body is not meant to sustain?
        • hga 12y ago
          If you're an ethical Vegan, e.g. someone who does not believe in exploiting animals for your food, then the diet being "bad" like that could be legitimately remedied by supplements.
        • Zigurd 12y ago
          > shows that you are using a given diet that the human body is not meant to sustain? In an industrialized society, you will have a difficult time finding a way of eating that can be justified as both optimally healthy and "as nature intended." By that measure the choices are bad, or less bad.
  • alphydan 12y ago
    > One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don't get a deficiency disease. Eating a balanced diet every day gets you way more vitamins than your body can absorb. I learnt this from a biologist who studied digestion about 18 years ago. According to him vitamin pills were completely unnecessary. I have never heard of people getting a deficiency disease with a balanced diet (say, a typical Mediterranean diet). So it's probably a combination of marketing and quick-fixes (The real message behind the pill is ... "Want to sit on your couch and eat pizza every day? No problem, just pop-in a pill!")
    • DanBC 12y ago
      Vitamin D deficiency is pretty common, especially among people further north. The changing advice on fat might help with that.
      • hga 12y ago
        "Deficiency disease" in this context and Vitamin D means rickets. And in addition to a one-a-day multivitamin multimineral tablet (split in two, each half in a different meal to improve absorption), I separately take 5,000 IU spread across all my meals, which has got my blood levels up to what they apparently should be. That's all the vitamin and mineral supplementation I take.
• astrodust 12y ago
  This really seems like confusing science with science headlines in the newspaper.
  • FreezerburnV 12y ago
    And yet, for a while now, the general "scientific consensus" has been "fat is bad for you", while recently it seems to be changing to "wait, fat isn't as terrible for you as we though, and could actually be quite healthy". I'm pretty sure the "fat is bad for you" stuff wasn't just science headlines in a newspaper for the past however many years. This is the main thing that he is talking about, where something makes into the mainline, including doctors telling people how to eat and live, and then suddenly people realize they had it all wrong and that what has been prescribed for years is actually very bad for you. Like cigarettes back in the day, (or even radiation and coke!) and fatty food now. EDIT: references for claims about cigarettes[0], radiation[1], and coke[2] being said as good for you (though I think I may have exaggerated about doctors recommending coke) [0] http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a171_c5.jpg http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a171_c5.jpg [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Radium_therapy_-_1913.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Radium_therapy... [2] http://www.vrouwen.nl/files/0/0/1/2/00121242.jpg http://www.vrouwen.nl/files/0/0/1/2/00121242.jpg
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > And yet, for a while now, the general "scientific consensus" has been "fat is bad for you", No, it hasn't. The general scientific consensus may have been that most Americans are consuming fat in general, and certain varieties of fat in particular, at levels which are unhealthy, and therefore that most Americans would be better off reducing fat intake in general, and certain common varieties of fat intake in particular. It may be that many people have overgeneralized this scientific consensus into a popular misunderstanding of "fat = bad", but that, again, is mistaking popular view (and the mass marketing of "low fat" products) with scientific consensus.
      • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
• api 12y ago
  "I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?" I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust. People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas because those advancing those points of view appear more credible than our society's institutions. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default -- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS? Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of the deepest negative emotions. Edit: Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs." I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon. He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this -- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of shrugged.
  • TTPrograms 12y ago
    The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail order degrees trying to sell books. If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives - what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?
• ohazi 12y ago
  "How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers?" You can start by teaching kids how real science is actually done in order to get them to understand and trust the process rather than the we-only-deal-in-absolutes pop-news headlines.
  • erroneousfunk 12y ago
    Exactly. "Science" != "believing scientists" There's a component of reading research papers, trying to understand other people's work, etc., but, fundamentally, science works and moves forward independent of "belief" -- that's the whole point. You don't like that "science" told you to drink 8 glasses of water a day, and now they're telling you not to? Great, go read the research and figure out how much water you need to drink in a day. Don't write a blog post harping on "science" because it "lied" to you. That just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what science actually is.
    • totony 12y ago
      What you say is false. Science is all about trust. There is way too much fraud being done just for quick fame. Who wrote those research paper you take for granted, scientists? Are you saying that these papers are always right in what they affirm, or that, worst case, their result cannot be forged?
  • Filthy_casual 12y ago
    In which case the fault shifts to media and schools for not explaining how things are. In Linux distribution terms, OP and the public want the stable distribution while in fact due to the nature of the field you can only get rolling updates.
  • calinet6 12y ago
    Shortest, most concise version of the right answer. Science is the doubt and uncertainty part, not the results part. New and better results should always be celebrated, and when framed right, they are. We need better science and liberal arts education for everyone. We no longer live in a world where it is optional.
• normloman 12y ago
  Science changes it's mind in light of new facts. That's why science is great. I don't understand what the author wants from science? To make up it's mind? That's not how science works!
  • kghose 12y ago
    My view would be to tone down the media hype. To get the message out in proportion to the evidence for it rather than in proportion to the size of the PR department of the university.
  • xrange 12y ago
    ...wait a minute, I thought "the science was settled"...
  • seanflyon 12y ago
    The author wants "science" to accurately communicate how certain particular conclusions are. By the time "science" new reaches the general public the certainty level always appears to be very high, even when there is no justification for that level of certainty. Even in well regarded scientific publications claims are often exaggerated and not reproducible.
• mcphage 12y ago
  Doing science is a lot like making sausages. There's a lot of conjecture, hypothesizing, testing, making observations, generating theories, testing those theories, throwing out the ones that don't hold up to repeatable studies. I don't think nutrition is unique in that matter. Where it differs from other sciences are: 1. The general public is very interested in the results, and so there's a lot of motivation for people to misunderstand or exaggerate the results in conveying them to the general public. 2. The connection between nutritional intake and results is very complicated, and ties into pretty much everything about how a person lives. The data is very noisy, and so it's hard to get good results. Other sciences, it's a lot easier to get clean data. And yet the needle moves forward, slowly. Ideas get refined, the details get filled in, and bad ideas get tossed out. We go from "fat = bad" to "some fats are bad and some are good". That's the natural progression of science. I'm sorry Scott Adams doesn't like that's how science works, but it's the best thing we've come up with so far.
  • api 12y ago
    Insufficient repetition is a huge problem in medical science. There is no incentive to replicate existing studies, as it doesn't advance your career. A related problem is that there is no incentive to publish negative results.
    • evv 12y ago
      Exactly. Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives that drive it are wrong. Especially with medical science.
      • api 12y ago
        Personally I think medical science and the health care industry are so broken that they should just be rebooted from scratch.
        • batbomb 12y ago
          What does that even mean?
• daeken 12y ago
  > Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong? This is asking the wrong question. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be done, when weighing scientific claims to act on, not just saying "this is right" or "this is wrong". If scientists are pretty sure that me eating an apple (for instance) is a good thing, it costs me little in exchange for a decent potential benefit. This is why a scientifically literate populace is so incredibly important; without it, you get this all-or-nothing hogwash that this article makes out to be a good thing, for whatever reason.
• Synaesthesia 12y ago
  The major problem is the influence of big corporations in funding studies and promoting certain points of view for their own benefit. This is a huge problem in the food industry and also the drugs and medicine business. If you look at the history of the popularity of vitamins, orange juice, the promotion of carbohydrates and sugars over fats and proteins etc. Not a problem with Science per se.
  • gadders 12y ago
    The promotion of carbohydrates over fat by Ancel Keys wasn't due to promotion by business interests. It was more due to him taking some partial evidence and making more of it than was warranted for personal aggrandisment.
  • fidotron 12y ago
    It's not just corporations. Science funding, generally, is far too tied to producing results that fit with the preconceptions of the group with the money. Combined with peer review being a frighteningly effective mechanism for enforcing the status quo, and it's unsurprising that once an idea is entrenched moving away becomes nearly impossible. The underlying problem is an insufficient diversity in sources of funding for science. Scientists are people, and most just want as safe a career as science allows, which isn't very safe at all. Rocking the boat is, for them, a bad idea.
    • jawns 12y ago
      This was essentially the argument Bill Maher used to defend his anti-vaccination stance a few years ago: The government is heavily pushing vaccines, and heavily funding vaccines, and he doesn't trust the government. (Of course, one could counter that you don't need to trust the government to know that vaccines have demonstrable efficacy and a very low incidence of serious side effects.) It's also the reason why I was, at first blush, rather suspicious when the Gardasil vaccine came out a few years ago. It was heavily, and extremely aggressively, marketed. And I know that vaccines don't tend to be moneymakers in the way that blockbuster drugs are, but it definitely raised my eyebrows that Gardasil was being marketed so aggressively, because of the reputation of Big Pharma, where money often comes before ethics and due diligence.
• hyperion2010 12y ago
  One reason for this is that the field of nutrition science is a complete circle jerk. They, like many other fields, only peer review internally, they have their pet hypotheses that they repeatedly validate with crappy statistics (because that's the standard for the field!) and postdocs alsmost never come from other fields. I read a piece detail this awhile back, can't seem to find the link now.
• temuze 12y ago
  People have always been pretty irrational about health. From the Greek beliefs of bloodletting/leechs to Edyptian amulets to homeopathy, we've associated taking X + some time => healthy. But that's the thing - our health can improve after receiving bad or neutral treatment because of time, which makes it really easy to confuse correlation with causation. When it comes to health, we easily fall prey to placebo effects.
• wutbrodo 12y ago
  > But can we stop being surprised when people don’t believe science? Humans can’t turn off pattern recognition. Jesus, I hate this line of thinking. It essentially boils down to "we're all just monkeys". Pattern recognition is the same thing behind a lot of in-practice racism[1], and yet no one would claim that one's actions should reflect racism just because our basest instincts do. We have a frontal lobe for a reason. Similarly, I can be aware that science may be wrong and still understand that, at this point in time, believing the alternatives has a higher chance of being wrong. Modulo widespread issues in study methodology etc (which may be a concern in some fields, but not really what this article is talking about), the principles underlying the scientific method are actually pretty easy to understand without any domain knowledge (of either the specific field or of study design/stats/etc). [1] It's a straightforward example of "pattern recognition" to reduce a person to one of their most striking and visible physical characteristics, like skin color, and then act towards them as a member of that group instead of a full, multi-faceted person.
• amass 12y ago
  Movements or fads like Avocado-based diets or the practice of drinking one glass of alcohol a day are really hard to justify scientifically because the human body has such a multitude of variables. It's almost impossible to test the effects of such a diet ceteris paribus. So I'm not sure if "science" can really be blamed. The general public wants a simple and easy solution, so the "science headlines" are going to try to give such a solution with half-proven theories and loosely-correlated results.
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    Not just a variable thing, also a time scale thing. I put my hand in a fire, I get a burn right away. Pretty easy to know what happened. Sure there were many variables. My shoes, my pants, the weather.. but pretty clear. Drinking a drink a day may do something good. May do something bad. But both those events happen in 20 years. Holy crap that is hard to tell! (but yes, partially because it mixes with many variables). There is also a part of science of "we all WANT what makes us happy to be deemed healthy!". Decision affirmation rocks! So if there are 4 studies that say a drink a day is bad for you, and 2 that say a drink a day is good - which makes the newspaper? Coffee, chocolate, alcohol - all things people love, and all affirmed by at least SOME studies out there. Awesome!
• Alupis 12y ago
  The problem is, most scientists say "We have evidence today to suggest ..." and most average-joe's hear "This is the absolute truth and everything else is wrong". Science is an evolution. What's "right" today might be proven wrong tomorrow (after more studies and research are done) -- and science is one of the only fields that admits that they got it wrong previously. Average-joe's just want someone to tell them "what is right" and leave it at that. Unfortunately that's just not how good science works.
  • Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    That's true. It's also true that diet et al. are actually hard problems. We're dealing here with complex systems. It's not easy to find optimal answers, assuming such answers even exist.
  • dragonwriter 12y ago
    > The problem is, most scientists say "We have evidence today to suggest ..." and most average-joe's hear "This is the absolute truth and everything else is wrong". Well, the problem is perhaps more precisely that scientists say "We have evidence to suggest...", and then marketers and propagandists say "It is proven that...", and that "Average Joes" mostly never hear what scientists say, only what the marketers and propagandists say.
• danans 12y ago
  I have a pet theory that half the reason that the public bought the overly simplistic theory that fats are bad is due to the collision in English between the word "fat" as a type of substance, and the common use of the word "fat" as a pejorative adjective. This has even affected some of my family members for whom English is a second language, but who learned both meanings of the word simultaneously in the 80s in the US. Some of them can't separate the concepts, no matter how hard I try to explain to them that they are mostly unrelated. EDIT: wording
  • protonfish 12y ago
    I think another reason people jumped all over it was vegetarianism - less fat (especially saturated) equates to eating less meat. Whether you are a vegetarian for environmental (raising meat requires much more resources) or for ethical (PETA) you would want to latch on to the low fat thing because it agreed with you.
• IvyMike 12y ago
  I'd argue that most human diet and fitness results aren't even 'science', simply because you can't treat humans like lab rats. The "experiments" we do are extremely limited in scope, and thus the results are limited in scope. Sadly, the authority of "science" combined with the desire to do something grand means that a lot of marginal, limited results get turned into authoritative broad headlines. ("Scientists say eggs bad^Hgood^Hbad")
• S_A_P 12y ago
  I like the point made. I also think he touched upon another point that needs fixing with the comment of "winged monkeys in the media". Mainstream news is broken. Sure its possible to dig up a good/factually accurate/balanced perspective story in some of the less visited corners of the internet. But news mainly serves to validate someones politics more than real reporting. This needs to change so that the media can earn back some credibility as well.
• themagician 12y ago
  The problem with the "science" around food and fitness is that there is an underlying assumption that is wrong, and that assumption is this: There are things that are inherently good for us. Nothing belongs anywhere, and nothing exists on purpose. Nothing is "designed" for us. So many diets and fitness fads tap into this idea of what is "natural" and try to implicate that there are certain things we are supposed to do. That the human body is "designed" to consume certain things in certain proportions. When you think about it for a second it becomes obvious that this is patently wrong. Everyone is different. Everyone is going to be genetically predisposed to certain conditions as a result of consuming certain things. There are some things we all have in common (basic need for certain vitamins and minerals), and there are certain things we know are bad for us. Our natural evolution has lead to the current state of things, but our consumption habits, behavior and understanding have now surpassed our natural evolution. Even when we try to get back to our most primal it doesn't make sense, because even humans running around 50,000 years ago eating berries weren't "designed" to do that. They simply didn't die as a result of doing it before reaching sexual maturity. We need to stop thinking about food as being good for us, as if we are going to find some magic diet that works for everyone. It's never going to happen. Our understanding of genetics and the human genome may lead us to a point in the future were we have a better understanding of how our individual genetics are affected by different foods—and we can synthesize substance or specific diets that are optimal for each individual—but we will never reach a state where we "figure it out." Why? Because there exists no correct answer.
  • samspot 12y ago
    This begs the question of why we consider the science of evolution to be so trustworthy, while considering nutritional science untrustworthy. At least we can experiment on nutritional science. Evolution has all the same headline-grabbing power as nutrition. Nutrition is actually what I think of when considering this. I am supposed to take their word for it on this complex topic, but we can't even decide if eggs are good or bad for us?
    • exelius 12y ago
      We actually know shockingly little about a lot of topics relative to our bodies. One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on live humans. But genetics and human biological systems may only play a part of how nutrition affects us. As an example, science is just now coming around to is that the bacteria in our intestines has a huge impact on how our body reacts to food - and that those bacteria vary wildly from person to person. Some peoples' intestinal bacteria are better at breaking down different types of fat, sugar or protein than others. Some people are lactose intolerant. Slight variations in the intestinal bacteria levels might even lead to obesity or other metabolic disorders - we just don't know because nobody's found a good way to study it yet. The net is that the human body is far more complex an organism than I think many people realize. DNA only tells part of the story. The entire way we design studies and test hypotheses is practically prehistoric - there's so much noise in the data that we can't pick out the signal because we don't even know what to look for. We're getting better data - which is helping - but we're still flying in the dark about this subject because there's no ethical way to disassemble a living human and perform the types of horrible experiments we can perform on machines or animals.
• RA_Fisher 12y ago
  I have a simple criterion for a summary judgement of the reliability of results: a) Is the data made available? b) Is it a Bayesian analysis? c) Has a power study been offered? As a statistician, I have a keen awareness of the ways that p-values can depart from truth. You can see Optimizely's effort to cope (https://www.optimizely.com/statistics https://www.optimizely.com/statistics). You can read about it in The Cult of Statistical Significance (http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Economics/dp/0472050079 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Econ...). This Economist video captures it solidly (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-chart-2 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-c...). The key component missing is a bias towards positive results. Most scientists only have two statistics classes. In these classes they learn a number of statistical tests, but much less how things can go wrong. Classic, "just enough to be dangerous." In order to cope, I have a personal set of criteria to make a quick first sort of papers. It's a personal heuristic for quality. I assume some degree of belief (Bayes, FTW!) that those that offer the full data set along side conclusions feel confident in their own analysis. Also, if they're using Bayesian methods, that they've had more than two stats classes. Finally, if they do choose Frequentist methods, a power study tells me that they understand the important finite nature of data in the context of asymptotic models / assumptions. I'd suspect that other statisticians feel this way, because I've heard that privately --- what do you think of my criteria?
  • xrange 12y ago
    R A Fisher is now promoting Bayesian analysis??? https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Fisher+%22prominent+opponent+of+Bayesian+statistics%22 https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Fisher+%22prominent+opp...
  • tjradcliffe 12y ago
    These are reasonable criteria. I also tend to be very sensitive to failure to correct for multiple hypotheses, as this is something I see all the time, particularly when people start sub-setting data: "We looked for an association between vegetables in the diet and cancer incidence, but only found it between kale and lung cancer." This happens all the time, and people report such associations as if they were the only experiment being run, whereas in fact they have run some combinatorically huge list of alternative hypotheses, and unsurprisingly have found one that looks significant at p=0.05 (which is a ridiculously lax acceptance criterion.) I also pretty much categorically reject case control studies: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1745 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1745 They are insanely over-sensitive to confounding factors. They can and do have legitimate uses to guide further research, but should never be used as the basis of policy or action beyond that. There's also a sense one gets from many papers that the researchers are black-boxing their statistical analysis: that they have plugged the numbers into some standard package and take the results at face value. While I appreciate that maybe not everyone can have a solid technical grasp of this stuff, it always bothers me when I see that because it is far too easy to generate garbage if you don't understand precisely what you're doing. [Disclaimer: I am an experimental and computational physicist who has never taken a stats course, but believe myself to be competently self-educated in the subject and have spent part of my career doing data analysis professionally using primarily Bayesian methods.]
• ebbv 12y ago
  This is a pretty terrible post. Science didn't kick people in the balls for 20 years, the media did. The media pushed bogus results of bogus studies on people, and overstates the case that "X is because of Y" on real studies who do not make such strong claims themselves. The media is responsible for people's distrust of science, because not only do they push bogus claims, but they also push FUD as well. Particularly oil and coal industry anti-climate change FUD for the past 20 years. That is precisely why people doubt the scientific fact of global warming. And yes I would prefer to live in a world where people defer to experts. It's great that people have "pattern recognition" but trusting your own half-assed judgment on an issue where there are experts who have studied something for 30 years is not "pattern recognition", it's hubris.
  • pjkundert 12y ago
    Actually, it would appear that scientists did, in fact, kick everyone in the balls for 20 years: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2014/6/the-statistical-crisis-in-science/99999 http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2014/6/the-s... Perhaps it was accidental in most cases. However, in the field of medical studies, the withholding of studies with negative outcomes (and their data) could be rightly described as "highly unscrupulous" researcher behavior. And this has apparently been de rigeur in medical studies for some time, and continues today: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/scandal-drugs-trials-withheld-doctors-tamiflu http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/scandal... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that published results are near worthless, if those publishing results are allowed to withhold studies. You just do studies until you get the results you want, and then publish that one. So, it is difficult to blame people for doubting things, when there is evidence of widespread "hacking" of results by so-called scientists.
    • ebbv 12y ago
      There's a big difference between being able to find instances of people doing this kind of thing, and widespread hacking of results. I think it's a given that it goes on sometimes, especially in cases where there is financial motive for doing so. But as far as it being a widespread issue? I have never seen evidence of that.
• VikingCoder 12y ago
  I really like Scott Adams, but I think he failed utterly on this post. The problem is media. News programming is constantly looking for something to breathlessly report, and is delighted to find one or more so-called experts who will loudly extol / lambaste the latest findings. If you look at the leading causes of death, understand your own history and risks, and follow the advice of credible doctors, you'll be doing great. Most of us don't do that, and then we scramble for fix-alls. It's these silver-bullet, "all-x-is-bad, all-y-is-good, z-causes-cancer, w-cures-cancer," reports that are jerking your chain.
• kin 12y ago
  I subscribed to Men's Health for over 5 years. I read every issue and many times headlines would contradict one another. Many of the headlines were based on studies from what felt like arbitrary Universities or Research Centers. It's pretty much the equivalent of click bait. When you read past the big letters and highlighted sections you see clearly that the studies aren't scientific at all. Their sample size is always too small or they always leave out important human factors or they leave out the middle man of cause and effect. When it comes to diet and nutrition I most definitely see a lot of bad science out there.
  • JabavuAdams 12y ago
    Men's Health is not a scientific publication. The point is that nutrition is a multi-billion dollar industry. That corrupts the science. Hey I want to make a new product that X segment will like. Can you guys go find some science that backs this up?
  • b_emery 12y ago
    For years I subscribed to the Berkeley Wellness letter (http://www.berkeleywellness.com/ http://www.berkeleywellness.com/). While not a scientific publication, it is written by MD's for the public, with the goal of taking the latest results and putting them in the context of every thing else that had already been done. It's like a low pass filter for health related science. Highly recommended.
• rail2rail 12y ago
  An exceedingly large number of people distrust science not because they've been paying attention to it, but because someone told them to distrust it. They couldn't care less about the rigor behind the science if it differs from their own worldview. We have an enormous problem of flat out science rejection in the US for no other reason than politics and religion.
• j0e1 12y ago
  I agree! In fact, except for the case of rock-solid proven theories, nascent theories that make it to headlines are treated as truth and the ill-informed seem to exhibit fanatical faith in them, forgetting that they are still theories. Being skeptical to these could earn you the title of a fool nowadays!
• supergeek133 12y ago
  I think a big problem is that science, by and large, doesn't control their message. News media does. Come to think of it, science related stories about what food is/isn't good for you etc are the original clickbait. They're a headline, when the devil is actually in the details. A great example is why you hear that horrible list of side effects during every prescription commercial. Once, during testing, someone got cancer. Therefore, it's in theory possible cancer was caused by that medication, however unlikely.
• IanDrake 12y ago
  Someone must have just read "The big fat lie". I could have written the same article after reading the book. A real eye opener and I suspect a similar book will be written about climate science in 30 years.
• ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  I found out recently that Scott Adams doesn't believe in evolution, which rather colours my response to this headline. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
  • muaddirac 12y ago
    He has some odd ideas about science. The end of his book "The Dilbert Future" calls for "new ways of looking at existing things." And then claims that all of science is just "looking at things" which, he points out, is pretty unreliable, and that we need to improve our ability to perceive the universe in order to move forward in science. Of note is that he doesn't consider technologies which enhance our perception to be actually doing that (microscopes, telescopes, and other types of sensors are just more forms of "seeing" to him, and are lacking). He then rather poorly explains double slit experiment and suggests that the arrow of time might just be a figment of your imagination, as well as the motion of objects in general, and gravity. He skirts around the idea that looking at existing ideas in new ways can be important (who would deny that?) but then devolves into useless examples, claiming that instead of gravity "existing", everything in the universe could just be expanding at just the right rate to create the illusion of gravity. He questions causal relationships and posits something no better than leibniz's monads. I've derailed a bit here, but man, that book irked me.
    • mcfunley 12y ago
      I'm glad someone else has noticed the profound weirdness of "The Dilbert Future." I stopped taking Scott Adams seriously a few minutes after reading it. I haven't looked at it since high school (in the 90's -- eek), but IIRC he also believes that his thoughts control the direction of the universe if he writes down affirmations in a notebook daily.
    • npsimons 12y ago
      And then claims that all of science is just "looking at things" Well, at least he got one thing correct. Mostly. Science is a system for generating a model of the world. It just also happens to be the best one we have, insofar as it has generated the most accurate model of the universe to date. Is it perfect? No. Should it be criticized? Yes, otherwise it won't improve. Should we throw it out altogether? Perhaps that question should be put to the literally billions of people whose lives have been saved and improved by the results of science. Or not. Those same billions are probably very badly informed about science, which is what Adams should be railing against, not science itself.
• enupten 12y ago
  No wonder Homeopathy et.al are making a comeback.
• hackuser 12y ago
  Despite the criticisms, the outcomes have been amazing. People are living longer and healthier lives than they did 20 years ago. Is Adams also forgoing vaccinations? My impression is (but someone with actual knowledge please contribute here) that modern medicine and science have achieved what no other institutions or ideas in human history have achieved, significantly extending human life and curing diseases that cursed humanity since the dawn of time. It is a miracle, and it continues -- life expectancy continues to improve and more diseases are coming under control of prevented (except measles, of course). Scott Adams' cartoons are insightful; he does not seem to apply the same depth of thought to his writing. This piece is poorly thought through. "Science" has told him nothing, unless he reads the research himself. News about science, and the public's poor grasp of uncertainty, risk, and the significance of scientific research (i.e., is this one study? settled science? etc.) are what generate confusion.
  • drumdance 12y ago
    If you read his latest book, he describes what I think is a very healthy view of science and the notion of expertise in general. For certain classes of problems, an expert will offer the right solution 98% of the time. But for edge cases it's more like 50%. I think there is a lot of conflicting science about nutrition (exacerbated by advertising), and people assume it falls in the 98% certain category when oftentimes it falls in the 50% category.
• Diederich 12y ago
  Taking a step back. The rate at which science has moved forward ever since there has been science has increased far, far more than the average human life span. Say, a few hundred years ago, it took science an average of X years to move forward enough to know that it was wrong about something. X was on the order of many human lifetimes. Today, science is moving so much more quickly. It 'finds out' it's wrong, over and over again, about a given topic, during a human's life span. Add to that the increased number of humans who are science literate. Add to that the total amount of 'bandwidth' between 'science' and people. Here is yet another area where technology has left biologies ability to cope in the dust. In this case, there are some possible solutions, mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Understanding what science actually means has never been more important. Here are my basic assumptions. Everything I believe is going to be proven wrong, multiple times, over the course of the next decades. All we can do is go forward, making sure what we do base our decisions on, every day, is the on our best and most honest efforts, for this moment in time. Note, I don't really think everything I believe will be proven wrong, in all likelihood. It's just a starting point. I understand my comments are skipping over a whole lot of important, relevant and fundamentally broken things, many of which can and need to be fixed.
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• Xcelerate 12y ago
  For me, science is synonymous with "predictability". By studying systems, you can create models and theories that allow you to create a prediction about the future which can then be verified. The key to science is the verification step (which is why supernatural concepts are not science; they've never been confirmed or denied). Based upon my definition, you may be wondering about something like the theory of evolution, since evolution concerns the past (and progresses too slowly to observe in the present). But the science in that field is still a future prediction -- the nature of the prediction is that it just so happens to be about the past. In other words, as new evidence emerges that explains what happened in the past, we can compare this evidence to our prediction for what kind of evidence we would find. So, if science is prediction, then good science is "better" prediction. Then what's the best science? Physics. Physics can make theoretical predictions that match reality up to twelve decimal places. That's insane. The next best science is chemistry, followed by biology, followed by nutrition and health (as the article discusses), followed by psychology. Does this mean that psychologists are not as intelligent as physicists? No, it just means understanding quantum mechanics is far easier than understanding how people work -- a view which I would hazard to guess most physicists would confirm. Despite the fact that QM requires advanced math that few can understand, the totality of information necessary to make predictions at a subatomic level is very small in comparison to the amount of information necessary to model a human (biologically or mentally). A few postulates, a few mathematical definitions, some numerical methods, and BOOM -- twelve decimal places of accuracy for the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron. One textbook would be completely sufficient to describe this prediction and the math behind it (although it may be kind of hard to read). On the other hand, there's no way a highly predictive model of a human could fit in one book. Unlike the elegant laws of physics, a human body is the result of millions of years of all kinds of adaptive chaos and evolution. There's no pretty equation that describes it. My point with all this is that the public hears "science" and they lump all science together. Instead, they should be educated on which fields of science are the most predictive, and which are still in major development. In this sense, they would have a better idea of what to trust when making decisions for themselves.
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• bglazer 12y ago
  My philosophy is this: Correlational nutritional studies should be trusted because they are the only and therefore best source of verifiable information on maintaining healthiness. They are, however, very noisy and each study in isolation should therefore influence my choices very little. Meta-analyses should be given more weight because they tend to smooth the noisiness. Scott Adams bemoans the fact that the wildly varying conclusions of diet science cause people's pattern recognition to conclude that this is not trustworthy information. However, the problem is not pattern recognition. The problem is the weight that people give to signals. When each signal is given a weight of 1 or 0, the pattern recognition will never converge on the underlying trend. The media and the public must understand that some studies should be given more weight than others. Thus, scientists have a duty to communicate which studies should be most influential. They CANT trust the media to this.
• enupten 12y ago
  I think Science to non-scientists becomes a matter of Religion, and for us who actually do it, it becomes a matter of Philosophy/Spirituality - if you forgive the medieval imagery of that sentence.
• argos 12y ago
  I have a problem with science been "done" Science is never done, or at least it shouldn't be. We create models and update them or change them as we get more evidence and the technological advancements allow us to perform better tests. Gravity was not done with Newton. sure, it's a great model to explain how objects are attracted to each other, but Einstein came alone and proved that that the model was not correct and it made incorrect assumptions (constant time for example). I think that is the great misunderstanding. We expect science to give us final answers. We expect it to study something and then be "done". But that is not the case.
• protonfish 12y ago
  Science is a process of understanding the world. No process or tool has yet been found to work better. When he insults science, he really means "Scientific consensus." I agree that there are huge problems with this, as consensus has little to do with science, and everything to do with mass media and government agendas. Something as politically charged as food with competing agendas of agriculture subsidies, environmental impacts, and public health and welfare is bound to be so controversial as to resist a clear message. So Scott and I are in agreement about this: what the media and our leaders have been, are, and will continue to tell of about nutrition is probably utter nonsense. And in their attempts to shove their agenda down the public's throats, they will wave around cherry-picked questionable "science" and accuse their detractors of ignorance. That's how effective PR works. I would see this as a failure of the press and our elected officials. Mr. Adams sees it as a failure of science. But what is his alternative? I don't know, but I do know that when somebody first tries to convince you that reason and evidence are not to be trusted, what they want to convince you of is probably not in your best interest.
  • calinet6 12y ago
    The main problem is really that people are not educated on what science is, exactly. You hint at it by separating 'scientific consensus,' but I think it's a deeper problem. Science is not truth, and it does not produce facts; Science is the process of getting it wrong over and over again and learning from it. Science is at its core a profound respect and love of doubt and uncertainty, and the ability to live and work inside that doubt with the aim of doing something productive with what we do not yet know. If people understood this one fact about science, they would be able to frame these issues correctly, and see this "being wrong" as what it really is: the expected function of an amazing process of advancement. This is why I advocate for universal, complete, liberal arts education. Scientific understanding and the humanity to know how to live with it. It's our only hope.
• thomasjudge 12y ago
  Part of the problem as I see it is this (and I only have a short amount of time right now but I have a lot of thoughts on this): Our paradigm for "science" is typically physics, in particular say newtonian mechanics. Force, mass, acceleration. 100% predictable. However, while human diet, nutrition, metabolism are ultimately based (in some way) in physics, chemistry, biology, microbiology, diet and nutrition in the individual case are incredibly complex and clearly not fully understood phenomena. So I think it is not exactly a failure of "science" or even the "media" at work here, but a failure to understand (which neither science nor the media has been particularly helpful on) the scope and LIMITATIONS of our knowledge and theories.
• deleted 12y ago
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• dkrich 12y ago
  I think there's a very real truth to what he's saying. I find myself wholly skeptical whenever I hear about the results of any scientific discovery such as a breakthrough in cancer research or diet/health issues. Partly to blame are media outlets rushing to publish "definitive" results to get a headline before overwhelming evidence that the results are in fact conclusive before they are known to be. Also to blame are of course, scientists themselves, who conduct faulty research and publish the results in a conclusive manner prematurely as well. That said, I think there's a distinction that needs to be made that Adams did not at the end of the post. He says that people are skeptical as to whether climate change is real due to the aforementioned credibility issues. I don't think this is really true. Most rational people (I realize that there are many who are not) do not dispute the existence of climate change. Any scan of climate data over the past century or photos of receding glaciers can quickly and conclusively show that climate change exists. What most people are skeptical of (and something that I do not believe scientists have yet convincingly proven) is that humans are directly responsible for the climate change. The climate of the earth was increasing prior to the industrial revolution, so how much humans are to blame is very much a debatable point. To qualify that, I have no vested interest in either side of that argument, however as a skeptical person, I do not believe that there is convincing evidence to support the claim. My father, who was a geologist and climatologist had the same belief. I think for me the issue is that people, scientists and reporters alike, have proven themselves to just not be that smart. They lack credibility because they continue to make claims that are shown to be false. How many reports did we hear that oil was going to spike to $300/barrel and that the economy was on the brink of collapse? How'd that turn out?
• dthal 12y ago
  Science has more and less reliable disciplines. In particular, in any field in which meaningful experiments are difficult or impossible to perform, causality will be hard to pin down. It just so happens that many of the topics the public is most interested in - health and nutrition, psychology, economics and, yes, climate - fall into that category.
• knice 12y ago
  Asking science to refute marketing claims is a huge distraction for science.
• threatofrain 12y ago
  I think the blame is on the fact that the scientific community does not have much power in the media, and is instead the puppet of the news media. But then again, all facts are puppets of the news station, made to be framed in any way that fits into any kind of narrative. The overwhelmingly dominant interface non-university people have with science is through news media. How else are you going to get your facts? By going out to different countries by yourself? By researching into all areas of interest? That's insane. The top four salient science media personalities are probably Bill Nye, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Dr Phil. Though, I wouldn't say that any of these people hold a candle to Bill 'O Reilly or Rush Limbaugh in terms of influence over public attitudes and opinions on science, and that's the problem. Science, in the eyes of the many, is just another fact in a news media report, and it can go any way the host or reporter wants it to. Yes, science has been inconsistent. Yes, science media personalities have been belligerent or not diplomatic on camera. Yes, there has been corruption of metrics and statistics. But... it just doesn't hold a candle to Bill O' Reilly. Or Sarah Palin, for that matter.
• JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Nutrition is a weird example to pick on, because it's dominated by marketing, financial interest, media mis-reporting etc. Nutrition works like this: your boss reads an article in some rag and thinks that there might be an opportunity to target a new market. They tell you to go find some studies or something that could back up your claims. Usually, this would not survive any kind of rigorous scientific investigation -- but it sounds good enough to use for marketing. Done. There's precious little science in nutrition. Just follow the money. EDIT> I remember the eighties and the beginning of the whole low-fat craze. It was clearly a marketing push, not anything based on reputable science. Hey our product contains Plutonium, but no fat. So, let's emphasize the positive.
  • olentangy 12y ago
    Global warming is a weird example to pick on, because it's dominated by marketing, financial interest, media mis-reporting etc. Global warming works like this: your boss reads an article in some rag and thinks that there might be an opportunity to target a new market. They tell you to go find some studies or something that could back up your claims. Usually, this would not survive any kind of rigorous scientific investigation -- but it sounds good enough to use for marketing. Done. There's precious little science in global warming. Just follow the money.
    • JabavuAdams 12y ago
      I don't understand what you're trying to say.
• cookiecaper 12y ago
  I really appreciate Scott Adams' temperate perspectives on controversial issues. He's usually able to legitimately grasp the underpinnings of issues that most people in tech circles don't even want to countenance. I have to agree that the overzealous apostles of Scientific Consensus that run around condemning people all the time often look very silly not-too-many-years-later. In their self-righteousness, they fail to see that they're just the same as the conservative grannies and aunts and uncles they look down upon with disdain: repeating a cherry-picked data point that they don't possibly have the professional background or academic context to actually understand, but which they fervently believe and adopt because it confirms their worldview and the people around them expect them to. People are all fundamentally the same, and most people of any affiliation will propagate anything if they accept the authority of its source. This applies to conservative and liberal persons equally -- very few of them are even capable of deciding if an analysis of a complex topic is valid or not, let alone putting forth the effort to actually vet it. The world runs on trust. Never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself. Visit Retraction Watch for a frequently-updated sampling of things "science got wrong".
• beloch 12y ago
  First, researchers can't get funding unless everything they do is world-shattering and of clearly superior quality. This is why you'll never see a published paper with a title like, "We did X. It failed. This is probably not that important, but might be interesting at some point in the distant future." More importantly, you'll never see an article in a top journal titled, "These other guys did X, and now we have verified they're not full of beans by doing X too". How science is funded is directly responsible for both the titles we see in academic journals and the research that is actually done. Second, even if a journal article isn't over the top in it's claims, the press releases about it will be. Journalists want to sell copy and generate page views. If what they're supposed to be reporting bores them, they'll get it wrong in an entertaining fashion more often than not. I'm sure Scott Adams and many here have heard that "Butter is healthier than margarine". A scientific study examined several margarines on the market and found that many brands contained a high percentage of saturated or trans fat. Based on the theory that saturated and trans fats are worse for your health than unsaturated fats (which is still supported by science) they concluded that some brands of margarine may be no more healthy than butter, which is mostly saturated fat (with some trans). A newspaper reported that this study proved that Butter was better for your than margarine, which was factually wrong based on that study, and then printed a retraction two weeks later. However, the damage was done. Dairy produces seized upon this single article and launched an ad campaign extolling the evils of their competitor. The "butter is better" myth persists to this day. The truth is still the same. Some margarines may be no better than butter, but others are. I'd like to point out one of my own great disappointments about health and fitness: Medical doctors don't seem to know any more about it than the next guy. You'd think medical doctors, through their study of the human body and the many maladies that can affect it, would be the perfect people to tell you what to eat, what not to eat, how to exercise, etc.. They're not. Their profession is entirely focused on spotting problems that require medical intervention and then giving that intervention. When the body is healthy, the best thing they can do is leave the patient alone. This is because every medical treatment carries with it risks and side-effects. As such, an optimally running human body is the least interesting thing in the world to a medical doctor. Furthermore, they're taught to maintain patient confidence by seeming to know more than they do, and they take courses that teach them specifically how to do this. Yes, faking that you know more than you think you know is a course medical doctors take (Source: sibling who is a medical doctor). Asking the typical medical doctor about diet and fitness is like asking a used car salesman about fuel and oil mixtures for a F1 engine.
• myth_buster 12y ago
  Jeez, I think Scott Adams is barking up a wrong tree here. The reason science has lost credibility is because of vested interest groups who put money into labs so as to get a result tailor made for them. Just as pattern recognition is one of our traits, fudging numbers and data is also up there. Add to it marketing which uses psychology to draw on our strings and play humans as puppets. I would be surprised if all this didn't amount to the fragmented society that we currently live in. Also Scott Adams is using very choosy topics to make his case against science which may not hold true in generality. The difficulty of getting sugar rich diet and drinks out of schools shows how obesity is not primarily due to lack of credible science. This also applies to Tobacco. I think this whole blog is a sensationalist piece which jumps from one extreme to another. > I’m pro-science because the alternatives are worse. (Example: ISIS.) ISIS is not an example of lack of science but an example of lack of empathy and humanity. I agree that the layman is not an idiot but there is a whole system built into society to patronize them and to make him/her feel that way. People are constantly told to rest their judgement and let the authorities tell them what it implies. This happens right from childhood where parents for the fear of being exposed of lacking knowledge on the topic use their authoritarian powers to suppress curiosity. A child who is constantly being exposed to that treatment will outsource his/her judgement for the ones put across by pundits in the media when they grow up. I think the "The Clean Room" episode [0] in NgT's COSMOS brings the fault in our system quite effectively by showing how Clair Patterson had to battle great odds to bring the ill effects of lead in Gasoline primarily because there was a big vested interest group who were against it. It's available on Netflix and I would recommend it highly. [0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3410940/?ref_=ttep_ep7 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3410940/?ref_=ttep_ep7
  • codyb 12y ago
    He mentions privately funded scientific ventures being fudged often. And if what you say is the case, you present a stronger reason for skepticism of scientific claim than mere pattern recognition. The piece is certainly sensationalist but it presents a valid point and tries to offer a view of understanding of alternative viewpoints. Walking in other people's shoes seems to be something many in the world have trouble doing. I know I've certainly met some quite militant science folks who think everyone who doesn't vehemently believe in the latest scientific concept is an idiot because p < 0.05. That kind of attitude wins no hearts and changes no minds of the "non believers".
• tjradcliffe 12y ago
  There are two things to say about this: 1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise. This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location. They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect Health. 2) Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative, which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422907267&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...
• charlieflowers 12y ago
  It seems what is missing in nutrition is the ability to _measure the results on your own individual body_ . For example, you can take a blood test, find out you're deficient in vitamin D, supplement for a while, then take another blood test and see results. But you cannot do that for most things to do with nutrition. You can't check your gut biome, see a problem, take a specific probiotic, then check again and confirm improvement, because we don't understand the gut biome well enough yet. You can't do it with most supplements. And even when you can, we hardly ever do. Insurance is not going to be a big fan of it. You also can't do it with switching from margarine to butter, or drinking more water, or whatever it is you think might help. Without some concrete measurable change that you actually measure, you're taking shots in the dark. I hope wearable devices can make some inroads here, at least for low hanging fruit (easily measured, well-understood things).
• WalterBright 12y ago
  > science failed my parents generation with cigarettes My father said that cigarettes were popularly called "coffin nails" when he was a boy in the 1920s, and that doctors routinely advised their patients to quit smoking. I've never heard of science advising people to smoke. Any scientist who cut open a smoker and saw those black, puss-filled lungs knew it wasn't good for you.
  • npsimons 12y ago
    This really, really pisses me off. It wasn't "science" that failed Adams' parents' generation, it was the media that was bought out by the same PR firms that are buying articles against global warming today[1][2]. There are issues with science to be sure, and one should always be free to criticize and call things out when one sees them, but this article is such garbage. You know where 95% of the bullshit in diet and fitness comes from? Greedy snake oil salespeople trying to make a quick buck off of desperate people looking for a quick fix. It has absolutely nothing to do with "science". [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt [2] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2014/06/26/the-public-relations-debate-about-global-warming-heats-up/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2014/06/26/the-publi...
• cookiecaper 12y ago
  The best demonstration of the fact that food science has failed, and the fact that commercial influence is prevalent in modern science and academics, is that obesity is still a significant global concern. Almost everything you can buy at a grocery store in the United States has been altered to make it more addictive. If you go to a store and buy the foods labeled as healthy, you'll soon learn that they're not really that different after all. If you go to a store determined to buy only food that is actually healthy, you're limited practically exclusive to fruits and vegetables, and even that is questionable since we don't know what type of chemical treatments or preservatives have been applied. "Make everyone eat only celery and go to the gym for 2 hours per day" is just not going to work. It may be a nice fantasy but it is never going to solve the obesity epidemic on a significant scale. Addictive ingredients have the side effect of causing obesity and as long as that's true, people are going to be cajoled into eating incorrectly at every turn, because everyone involved wants to sell you more food. The obesity epidemic is a result of scientific advancements that have allowed us to acquire an unlimited amount of the most biologically desirable food ingredients on a near-global scale. We can't go back in time and uninvent this stuff, and we can't actually expect people to switch to a diet of 25 celery sticks per day, so we need a scientific solution that solves the problem. And there isn't one, because obesity doesn't really represent a commercial threat to anyone in particular -- if anything, it creates new commercial opportunity for another super-powerful industry in the U.S.: medicine. Maybe the airline industry will fund a solution once people get too heavy to be effectively carried by airplane.
• shanusmagnus 12y ago
  I think Adams is very wrong here. I'm sympathetic to his reasoning, since I have followed nutrition closely for the last twenty years, and believe the scientific/media consensus to be much as he described, and even worse than that occasionally, where people who should know better (a PhD teaching a class on nutrition in a community college) claim things that are both factually and obviously wrong ("Low carb diets are bad because the brain can only metabolize glucose" which has been known false for at least 50 years and probably more.) Cynicism, in some cases, is warranted. That said, I think Adams is letting people off _way_ too easily. You will notice that when people refuse to believe a scientific position they are always (surprise!) advocating a different position more advantageous to themselves, that will not inconvenience them and that does not reflect badly on them or on those with whom they affiliate. They deny climate science not because the poor wounded souls have had their hearts broken too many times, but because the implication is that their lifestyle decisions are having adverse effects on the world, and addressing those adverse effects will be costly; and because (this is important) because the idea of faggy liberal scientists telling them they're living wrong is too much to take. It is not an accident that the vocal opponents of things like climate change, global warming, animals welfare, pollution, etc., are the same folks who are 100% convinced that they sometimes get personal messages from angels. Their idiotic worldviews do not arise as a result of Bayesian discounting based on having received bad advice, but from intellectual laziness and an inability (or unwillingness) to look in the mirror and see a possible problem there. (And the aforementioned affiliatory thing about faggy liberals.)
  • msandford 12y ago
    >It is not an accident that the vocal opponents of things like climate change, global warming, animals welfare, pollution, etc., are the same folks who are 100% convinced that they sometimes get personal messages from angels. Their idiotic worldviews do not arise as a result of Bayesian discounting based on having received bad advice, but from intellectual laziness and an inability (or unwillingness) to look in the mirror and see a possible problem there. Way to character assassinate man! Bravo! This "If you don't agree with me you must be an idiot" kind of mentality does little to address the reality of the world, and rather than advancing science, hinders it. I'm a bit skeptical of global warming, anthropogenic climate change, etc not because I want to bury my head in the sand, but because from my point of view there's a HUGE echo chamber. I've read tons of papers which all basically confirm the theory but precious little which tries to look for alternative explanations. That feels awfully similar to the whole "fat is bad for you" advice from the medical community and thus, I think Adams isn't too far off base. For example, there was a significant hiatus from warming for the last 10 years or so when there "shouldn't have been" (whatever that means) and it's only recently that some scientists have proven why. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-heat-and-slowed-pace-of-global-warming/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-hea... That's a substantial part of the theory to be missing and yet still proclaim that the original theory was totally great and not problematic at all. Like you said: Cynicism, in some cases, is warranted.
• dmfdmf 12y ago
  > So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong? Forget about the common citizen, the scientists themselves don't know when science is "done". This is the problem of induction and most scientist are completely ignorant of the issue because they dismiss epistemology and, more generally, philosophy as nonsense. So they implicitly or explicitly substitute "consensus" for truth which is a horrible mistake. BTW, I don't agree that getting halfway is the same as being "wrong", science is a process after all and unlike Zeno's paradox the state of scientific knowledge is not always half-way to its target, Karl Popper's claims to the contrary notwithstanding. > I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what science says it is because the scientific consensus is high. The problem here is complicated by government funding of science and positive feedback that only "consensus" consistent research gets funding. Sure there is window-dressing "opposition research" but its purpose is not the truth but to justify the consensus. Science has become politicized by the use of government money and that's why things such as global warming have become political hot buttons. There is a lot of money and power at stake and people want to fly the flag of "science" to achieve their political goals. When politics and science mix, bad things result. cf. Soviet Union. > And we all know that studies funded by private industry are suspect. I think this true today but that it is wrong. The tacit, unspoken assumption behind these suspicions is that government funding is NOT suspect and free from all biases. I think that that is logically and historically false. Certainly revealing ones funding is important because funding can be a source of bias but in the end science should stand on its own merit regardless of the source. I think Scott Adams has named something that has been going on for decades now which is that the American people rightfully no longer trust science and scientists. Part of this mistrust is a product of the rising anti-technology luddites, religion and the opposition to reason in the culture as he points out. But like Adams I think that the distrust of science has also been earned and I believe it is because of the politicization of science via government funding. The leaked emails in Climategate revealed that maybe the scientists were not being so objective after all. The clearest evidence of dishonesty that I read was that in public the pro global-warming scientists would call for the opposition to publish their results and arguments in peer reviewed journals. In the background they were actively working to block the publication of such research or boycott any journals that did so. It is now considered "scientific" to dismiss your opponents with ad hom "climate denier" labels, secretly politic to limit dissent and smear the opposition as anti-science morons (the implication that Adams was addressing) and using political marketing tricks like changing the name from "global warming" to "climate change" to make the opposition look like fools. These are the methods of a Karl Rove or James Carville not science nor scientists. This is not science.
• kak9 12y ago
  The original research supporting "carbs are good, fats are bad" made such trivial statistical errors it's kind of crazy.
• jeffdavis 12y ago
  "Scientific consensus" is an oxymoron, because consensus is not a scientific process. Unless by "consensus" you mean that a lot of scientists have successfully reproduced an experiment. But nobody ever means that. That being said, scientists are often informed and educated, so their opinions should be valued. But please take off the lab coat and call it an opinion.
• snowwrestler 12y ago
  People trust science implicitly 1000 ways every day: when they get in their car, when they check Facebook, when they step into an airplane, when they take some Advil, when they eat a Snickers bar, when they take an antibiotic, when they take Viagra, when they make a phone call, etc. So the question is not "why don't people trust science," the question is "why do people very selectively mistrust small segments of science?" A plausible answer is because there are people and organizations who are encouraging them to mistrust those small segments of science--by purposefully feeding bad information into the marketplace of ideas. I think Adams is making a fundamental error of attribution, blaming good actors (real scientists) for the actions of bad actors. He's basically arguing that unless scientists can stop all bad information from anyone, they can be blamed for the bad information. Doesn't seem fair or sustainable.
• TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I do see a kind of anti-induction thing going on, similar to what happens on stock markets. In the case of science, when people trust research, we have all kind of assholes[0] flocking to it and using it to push their agenda, up until people don't trust science anymore. Come to think of it, this applies to all kinds of things people trust. The problem seems to be, people don't care about being lied to. Politicians spew bullshit all the time, there's hardly a true fact you can find in a newspaper, and yet everyone just goes "meh". There should be back-pressure. Journalists should lose their jobs over lying to people, and that includes all that nonsense science reporting that is killing trust in life-saving research. But no one seems to care. [0] - I honestly believe abusing people's trust in something is one of the most dickish move you can pull.
• Yaa101 12y ago
  There is nothing wrong with science persé, the problem is the people working in science, a lot of them are corrupt. Not often by birth are they corrupt but mostly due to pressure by the ones handing science money, and it does not matter if the donaters are government or private parties. Most donaters give money to serve their goal and not to get neutral answers about how things work. In other words, we the people should look into the mirror closly to get the answer about why science is so corrupt.
• tsotha 12y ago
  Heh heh. Economists would have the crown for being wrong the most often if not for nutritionists.
• pvaldes 12y ago
  People don't need to trust science, they need to understand science. If you did never have time for educate yourself and develop a real critical sense, don't blame the other guys.
• pm 12y ago
  How much of a generation getting fat is attributable to institutionalised science versus people divesting responsibility for what and how much they eat and exercise?
• jakobegger 12y ago
  The biggest problem with Science is that it usually doesn't answer the questions we actually want answered. The problem happens when we try to extrapolate from scientific results. When we make claims about human nutrition based on experiments with rats. That's when we run into trouble. Usually the scientific answer should be "we don't know". (That's also the reason why people run to some quack doctor and start taking homeopathic remedies. You'll get answers there. Unfortunately, people trust those giving answers more than those saying "I don't know".)
• Mz 12y ago
  I think part of the problem is that the human race is like that story about the six blind men and the elephant, where one guy argued it was like a spear because he had only touched a tusk and another guy argued it was like a tree trunk because he had touched a leg and so on. There are billions of people here, each with their own unique experiences, their own little slice of the truth. It is only reasonable that some think their piece is TRUE and attempts to rebut their piece of the truth must be crazy or something. When I look back on historical concepts of things, often, they are decent mental models, given the limited information available. For example, Native Americans of the Pacific North West thought that the world was a bit of land floating on water in a bowl. This area is geologically active and when there is an earthquake, water runs up onto the land, not unlike what would happen if you floated something in water and then pushed down on one end with a finger, tipping it. So it's a fairly good mental model for the limited information available to them. It's not accurate given what we know today, but I think it's disrespectful and a disservice to act like it is simply "dumb." I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to take seriously the piece of the puzzle different people have and how to help people who see things very differently communicate effectively. It's shockingly hard. Most people want to insist, NOPE, you are an idiot and fucktard because I KNOW the elephant looks just like a spear. I have experienced that first hand, by god! The part that most frustrates me is that the people who are the worst about this are often not the conspiracy theory "nuts" but the closed-minded folks doing it in the name of "science."
• cttet 12y ago
  Read the papers. The articles on news about "science" are only news.
• faske 12y ago
  This is refreshing to hear that I am not the only one who see this happening to the general public. This is a good video that explains how to determine which "science" is trustworthy or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0