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Science’s Biggest Fail

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Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#151

Post by Alupis »

spiritplumber wrote: post #139
_sword wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While pretty good about science, Neil Degrasse Tyson has aided in perpetuating misunderstandings of history and philosophy that make me shy away from supporting his work.

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.

> So, knowledge celebrities will be in an environment that encourages pontificating on subjects they aren't experts about

A lot like asking porn stars for investment advice[1]

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/102381529

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#152

Post by exelius »

themagician wrote: post #127
exelius wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Excellent points. I think what it really highlights is that, for most food items, there is no right or wrong answer as to how good/bad it is for you. There is some directional information, but even that should be taken with limited confidence.

Exactly - there are correlations, but there's no definitive answer either way. For some people, a high-carb diet may lead to weight gain and increased levels of LDL in the blood -- while others on the exact same diet may not see those issues, even with the same diet. We don't know what causes the difference, and it may not be possible to design an ethical study to discover it.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#153

Post by tjradcliffe »

RA_Fisher wrote: post #53

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 ). You can read about it in The Cult of Statistical Significance ( http…

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 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.]

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#154

Post by Zigurd »

brianwawok wrote: post #52
TillE wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

> 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.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#155

Post by api »

cookiecaper wrote: post #142
api wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades? Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease. One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine. I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not…

>I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely witho…

The Science-as-religion movement, which I personally call fundamentalist positivism, is doing more harm to science than a million creationists and anti-vaccinationinsts and faith healers could possibly do. It undermines science from within by performing a kind of deep epistemological bait and switch -- replacing scientific epistemology at the root with religious epistemology while leaving the layers above superficially unchanged. Destroy it with fire.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#156

Post by api »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #149
api wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point about mercury. What are people supposed to think? "Mercury is so bad I'm barely allowed to purchase or handle it, but then I'm supposed to then inject it into my baby?" Yes there's a lot of nuance here, and a lot of cost/benefit analysis around the risk of a tiny amount of mercury (in excretable compound form) vs. the risk of nasty diseases. But it becomes harder to communicate that nuance and be beli…

Well we could stop acting like pure mercury is all that dangerous to begin with...

I played with it as a kid and I'm perfectly fine. Just look at my comment history.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#157

Post by Dylan16807 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #142
api wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades? Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease. One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine. I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not…

>I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely witho…

The anti-vax thing isn't even a science issue, it's fearmongering based on nothing. The burden of proof is on the people claiming all these different kinds of vaccines have negative effects.

I don't know why the hell you brought up marriage.

You have a point about people getting zealous about climate change, but I think that's a response to people's horrific innate reaction of doubling down when faced with evidence against something they believe.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#158

Post by shanusmagnus »

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.)

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#159

Post by b_emery »

kin wrote: post #60

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 alwa…

For years I subscribed to the Berkeley Wellness letter (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.

Re: Science’s Biggest Fail

#160

Post by olentangy »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #130

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…

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.
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