Science’s Biggest Fail

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".

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.

Just think how much progress we could make in neurology if we could open up prisoners' brains and tinker around with them?

Or to link back to the nutrition topic, what if we could just take prisoners and replace their intestinal bacteria with different mixes of gut bacteria? Continue to feed them a control diet and see who lives, who dies, who gets fat and who loses weight. Obviously, that experiment would be terrible -- but we'd find out pretty quickly what the "magic formula" is.

Could we bioengineer a gut bacteria biome such that an otherwise unmodified human could consume crude oil as a source of nutrition? How about one that can't get drunk because the bacteria break down the ethanol right in the stomach? We probably could -- but many people would die in the research process.

I'm not saying that we should do this type of research -- but our lack of ability to do it has hampered our understanding of the human body, and will continue to slow progress relative to other scientific fields where such research IS ethically possible (e.g. building the LHC to understand subatomic particles).

I think there's also a general problem with people interpreting what's communicated to them. They need great storytellers to get across the correct information with the correct nuances. Otherwise you get media institutions with bogus headlines and misleading quotes to build hype and panic. Fox News is notorious for this, but most media prefers to sell snake oil over science because people want a simple message. Unfortunately science is not always simple.

Thing is - the tribal caveman in us craves to hear from a wise man (or wise woman). We didn't evolve with that sort of thing being specialized. So, knowledge celebrities will be in an environment that encourages pontificating on subjects they aren't experts about.