(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

Watch what you take away from this Tierney article.

The wrong impression to walk away with is to think that this in some way proves that whatever scientific consensus you take issue with might be the result of this false "cascade" theory. The cascade phenomenom preys upon human opinion. As you will read in the article, anyone who applied science to the low-fat diet thinking found it was full of shit.

Pay close attention to this line in particular:
[Dr. Ahrens] pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.

That is how you get your faulty, cascading popular theory masquerading as fact. When you turn to physicists and psychologists and other people who've somehow thrown a "Dr." before their name instead of relying on the experts working in the field being questioned, you open the door to bias. So congratulate yourselves, creationists: it's not your fault; you're just aping what smarter people would admit are only their own ignorant opinions (they don't actually have hard evidence to back it up, so it remains the biological equivalent of an objection of heresay).

If it weren't for these people lending their credentials to the opposite conclusion of evidence, we'd be having a very different conversation about a lot of biology today in this friggin' country.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

This is a sad, slightly disturbing, yet totally unsurprising bit of herd mentality in action.

On the other hand, I'm totally eating a big wedge of full-fat cheese when I get home!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Me too! And I had some for lunch as well!

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

As you will read in the article, anyone who applied science to the low-fat diet thinking found it was full of shit.

True, but ... Individual scientists still pushed the low-fat-diet hypothesis, and as a group they largely endorsed it. Like you, I believe the weight of scientific evidence can eventually overthrow a lousy theory, but it can take a while.

When we're dealing with purely theoretical hypotheses it's fine to say "we don't know." When you're dealing with something like medicine, however -- with someone yelling "Doc, how do I keep myself from having a heart attack?!" -- you can't just shrug your shoulders and call for more research. It's all too easy, in those circumstances, to just repeat unsubstantiated hypotheses like the low-fat-diet.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There's no general guidelines where diets are concerned where one or another patient won't object or fuss. The only theory that is proven to work is "exercise more, eat less" period.

As for the scientists who did the debunked research, that just strengthens the call for rigorous application of scientific research standards. Bias must be kept out of the process in all areas.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Alright, but you can't eliminate bias -- or even identify it, necessarily. Science isn't some idealized Positivist process. It's full of big egos, feuds, academic empire-builders and, yeah, cultural biases (which at their deepest won't even be recognized as such). We have to understand the limitations of science as it's actually practiced as well as its strengths, even though (in the short term) those limitations will be exploited for demagogic ends by science's enemies.