RSS
Back in the 1990s eggs had an image problem. They are high in cholesterol, so the recommendations for intake were such that many people started avoiding them. Ergo, this commercial from the 1990s trying to convince kids that eggs are not the work of the devil. What was the science behind this? You can read the back story yourself.
But after all these years it turns out that in most people dietary cholesterol is not an issue. Eggs are now back on the menu according to the powers that be. The New York Times notes that it is a “a belated acknowledgment of decades of research showing that dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on the blood cholesterol levels of most people.” Decades. Let that sink in about how stubborn parts of the “scientific” establishment can be.
Science is a human endeavor. And some science is also much harder than other science. The “hard sciences” are different in many ways from the rest. The precision which physics is capable of is never going to be replicated in large domains of biology, of which medicine is the most relevant domain for the public. The issues are even more thorny when it comes to disciplines outside of natural science which manifest scientific aspirations. Here’s looking at you economics!
This is why I don’t like the “because science” meme. It should be “because science, for now.” Or, “perhaps, because science.” There is some science which is tried & tested, robust, and has not only withstood decades or centuries of critique, but yielded incredibly returns in practical domains. Think engineering. Then there are other sciences, such as much of nutrition, clinical psychology, and social science, which is important, but which offers answers which seem contingent on fads and fashions because of the proliferation of studies with low statistical power, or correlations which are ultimately just confounds. So what happens is the science does not shape opinions, opinions shape the science people choose.
On some level we all know this, but it is important to reiterate it. Like democracy science is the best that we have for a particular task. But in many specific instances it turns out to be really crappy. Because it’s hard, and nature is messy. Humility in science is a good thing. So is firmness of conviction, when it is warranted.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
One is reminded of Max Planck’s famous aphorism that “science progresses one funeral at a time.”
The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.
von Jolly's funeral was probably one he had in mind .
“Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all?” – Stephen Hawking
Re-investigate Piltdown Man!!
Very well said, Razib. It is a difficult and unavoidable dilemma that you have to make policy decisions, science seems the best source of guidance; but sciences that study humans are shifting sand because so much is learned so fast.
I think the long-established practice of having scientific guidelines based on publically available evidence is probably the best solution. Let scientific knowledge, such as it is, generally the best thought we have, win people over through education.
Most people happily follow such guidelines. Some people will not follow the guidelines. Steve Jobs turned down chemo, and it cost him dearly. As such, he served as a warning to people that “thinking different” can be expensive when it comes to choosing your cancer treatment.
On the other hand, people who never put much stock in the egg warnings are feeling pretty vindicated, I’d imagine.
It’s a self-correcting system, albeit a slow and inefficient one.
He would have been better advised to accept the conventional treatment, but there's still a high chance he would have been a goner. I don't think people should make too much of his decision, because it might well not have materially affected the outcome.Replies: @Robert Ford
As to Hawking, Lubos Motl points out that even electrons [or maybe especially electrons] have free will of a kind. Strict determinism is impossible because the world operates according to quantum rulels.
As to the problems in nutrition science, one should never discount the likelihood of fraud. There’s a great deal of money to be made in academic research, and university faculty are almost entirely unsupervised and unmonitored. Industrial sicentists on the other hand are monitored and supervized rigorously, and their results are studied by regulatory agencies.
Fraud is minimal in the hard sciences like physics where reports can be checked with some facility, but the biological/medical/environmental sciences are very hard to check and fraud is rampant.
I used to tell my colleagues, It’s so hard it’s easy. Easy that is to produce any old results and get them published.
I knew it !
Polaroid filed for bankruptcy in 2008 so he’s SOL there too.
From the Wikipedia article on Max Planck :
The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.
von Jolly’s funeral was probably one he had in mind .
The science was not really wrong. As your quote says, decades of scientific research have said that eggs are okay. Those who follow the actual research have been right. The medical and nutrition authorities have been wrong, not the scientists.
> So what happens is the science does not shape opinions, opinions shape the science people choose.
Has this been scientifically proven?
A propos of what you said, maybe we should distinguish between the fallibility of “pop” science and the fallibility of “pure” science. The “eggs are bad meme” was the fault of pop science, where political or business interests become invested in a particular scientific thesis and deliberately misrepresent the true state of research. However, it might be useful to acknowledge that even pure science can be fallible. I think Razib in previous posts noted how the social sciences in particular are highly politicized internally, so that it is hard to pursue a career by publishing results that appear to support conservative political positions, even if your research is methodologically sound.
Cholesterol is a steroid produced by your body in the liver which
is used by every cell in the body including manufacturing of Vitamin D
if you expose your skin to the Sun.
So millions of years humans spent in Africa it was evolutionary advantage to
have high cholesterol as sun was there as well.
so what happen.
Humans distributed to all corner of the world.
Humans also started living indoor more and having other humans doing their manual labor.
White man took over the world
and started imposing its norm on the rest of the world.
Lo and behold a CEO of drug company did Ph. d in Cholesterol and this same
company spent millions developing drugs to reduce it.
US and NZ allowed drug advertisement to the general public.
boom modern science got manipulated so easily.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) had some more to say about that. Bad science becoming failed policy has led to widespread, and justified, skepticism of science.
I think the long-established practice of having scientific guidelines based on publically available evidence is probably the best solution. Let scientific knowledge, such as it is, generally the best thought we have, win people over through education.
Most people happily follow such guidelines. Some people will not follow the guidelines. Steve Jobs turned down chemo, and it cost him dearly. As such, he served as a warning to people that "thinking different" can be expensive when it comes to choosing your cancer treatment.
On the other hand, people who never put much stock in the egg warnings are feeling pretty vindicated, I'd imagine.
It's a self-correcting system, albeit a slow and inefficient one.Replies: @Sandgroper
Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, with a low success rate. It is far from certain that Steve Jobs could have been treated successfully with conventional treatment, and so he opted to put his faith in “alternative treatment” which was basically a waste of time.
He would have been better advised to accept the conventional treatment, but there’s still a high chance he would have been a goner. I don’t think people should make too much of his decision, because it might well not have materially affected the outcome.
He would have been better advised to accept the conventional treatment, but there's still a high chance he would have been a goner. I don't think people should make too much of his decision, because it might well not have materially affected the outcome.Replies: @Robert Ford
I recently read in Forbes that he was “fortunate” enough to be one of the 5% more easily treatable pancreatic cases. I think his biographer is the source.
“Because science” is just Newspeak for “Simon Says.”
The other meme that the egg debacle and other nutrition-science discrepancies place under suspicion is the “The science is settled!” claim. One wonders how nutrition science and its proponents have in common with climate science and its proponents. I am not presupposing the answer. Just because claims about the healthfulness (or lack thereof) of eggs have been disproved does not mean that some completely different claim about a completely different set of phenomena will be or is being disproved. Still, the self-righteous use of rhetorical devices like “denier” in the pop science media in connection with the climate change question does make one wonder if this “settled” science will become unsettled in the future and follow the nutrition science lead.