I think the real takeaway is that the "real science" in areas like nutrition and even medicine is waaay, way less developed than what us nerdy types assume. They present themselves as "serious", and we take that to mean "special relativity" / "quantum mechanics" understanding-of-physics level refined knowledge and epistemology, but really they're at the "four elements make up the world" level of understanding. Basically: no one knows jack shit but it's called science so we take it seriously anyway.
Yep, agreed. It's fascinating that we can, in a sense, go to the moon medically (insane surgeries). But we don't really know how eating or sleeping works. I'm not very confident in exercise science, either.
There are very confident people in all these sciences, but they contradict each other, and their advice seems to work at best marginally, for some people.
Indeed, I was thinking of surgery as an exception in the back of my mind when I mentioned medicine. I wish we (society) could differentiate these fields better and be clearer about what we know and don't know. Why do we have to pretend all parts of medicine are as refined and effective as surgery? It's like some sort of society-wide taboo to suggest otherwise. Usually one response is "but it's the best we got" (meaning: shut up, and follow their advice). But if you frame it in the "four elements make up the world is the best theory we got" sense, you realize that the statement might technically be true, but still following any advice from it is likely to be worse than nothing. It's so wrong and misguided that you're better off not knowing about it. And that's insane.
I suspect all the people who don't actually know what they're doing are highly motivated to associate themselves with those who do. If everyone thinks physics is great, dress & talk like a physicist and you'll get credibility by osmosis.
Yeah, I was really surprised by this when I was around forty. All my earlier contact with science was with physics and chemistry and maths.
I used to say "Alternative Medicine is an oxymoron. If it worked it would just be medicine". In fact I'm told I used to say that a lot.
I assumed that they were serious people, because they worked in the same places that my heroes worked, and they had the same sorts of letters after their names. But they really aren't. They don't follow obvious clues, they never check their assumptions.
No faith in medicine is ever going to survive contact with the medical literature.
My respect turned into a deep contempt, and over and over again I've been surprised to find that I've been erring on the side of insufficient contempt.
I actually think that most of what doctors know they know in spite of modern medical research. And there's no way to tell which of the things they know is actually true.
I do think they're improving though. They have at least noticed the "replication crisis".
I will be most interested to watch how the doubly-labelled water people react to this apparent failure of their method.
The right answer is: "Work out what happened, check it's real, make it reproducible, trace the mechanism, see if the method can be fixed, actually test it carefully this time, work out what of the pre-existing research can be rescued and what is just flat wrong, work out what theories are based on now false assumptions, retract everything, redo most of it, and republish a completely new set of conclusions."
Real sciences do this and they honour the people who showed them that they were broken. Pretend sciences don't.
Is that just a Tim Minchin line? Lol. A tinge of ginge on your-
Unfortunately, I think there's very little real science left in nutrition. Nutrition scientists I've talked to seem to be the least interested people I've ever met.
They hold the curious position that obesity is 1. completely understood & solved and 2. totally out of control & beyond repair.
E.g. it is widely "known" that every diet works, and everybody diets all the time, and nobody loses any weight.
Kevin Hall released a paper on how even losing weight is a failure, because nobody who loses weight can keep it off, because losing weight necessarily ruins your metabolism.
Now I happen to disagree with pretty much every step there, but the paper reads like an admission of defeat, a white flag.
At the same time, I've had Serious Professional PhD level nutrition Scientists on Twitter reply to me with "So what [about your stupid cream diet], lots of people effortlessly lose weight with weight diets." DO THEY THOUGH?
I can guarantee you, if somebody had found a way to levitate without the use of jet engines, the engineers and scientists in that field would be all over that guy. If it was common that individuals went on a weird diet and suddenly defied the laws of gravity, the answer would NOT be "so what."
Oh I see what you mean! That's a very old thought indeed. Certainly older than youtube videos and possibly older than Australia. I thought you meant the bit at the bottom. I can't believe you got me watching a video....
A fault in your model is such a great opportunity for learning. Unfortunately I expect the reaction to be "it was just a small thing, the model was basically right in all the ways that matter, don't think too much about it we've fixed it now, case closed."
I wonder how we can talk about this or communicate this to our rational and science loving friends without it seeming like an anti-science position (when in fact the whole point is that we're pro science). I feel like I can't really express this view without it being taken as an attack on science itself or something.
> when in fact the whole point is that we're pro science
I don't think I *would* describe myself as pro-science. That's carrying all sorts of baggage these days.
I'm fascinated by physics, chemistry, mathematics and these days by biochemistry and I judge them mostly sound. There are many other fields that I don't think are necessarily truth-finding.
I'm pro-empiricism and I'm a reductionist. I have a strong feeling that the world should make sense in terms of its parts.
I'm emphatically not in favour of just anyone who's bought a white coat and does studies in a university. In fact I despise a lot of the social structures that call themselves sciences, precisely because they are stealing the honour owed to physics and chemistry while not doing the work.
I'd describe myself as a compatibilist materialist, not necessarily a reductionist. I think all things make sense, but I'm under the impression that there's a big gap between "can be explained" and "we can explain it" and it will likely always be there.
In a sense it's like Fermi's paradox: we discover more known unknowns than we solve at any given time, and likely always will, so our knowledge in the long term trends toward 0%.
Sure. It took damn near two thousand years to demonstrate that you can't square a circle. And we understand the rules of chess but we don't know who wins, and we may never know. The question is well posed, but the proof may not fit in the universe.
If "reductionist" means someone who believes that if we understand the parts then we understand the whole then I'm not one of those. They sound silly.
I mean something like: The whole behaves as if it was made up of its parts. There's nowhere to sneak magic in. "Processed foods" is not a natural category. There has to be a lower-level reason why they're bad.
Perhaps compatibilism is the right word. Free will and determinism are not irreconcilable. My mind is made of parts, and all the parts obey the laws of physics.
Yea I am of the same perspective here as you. I'd say categories don't exist in reality, only in the observer.
I assume materialism & causality is true because I literally cannot imagine the alternative. It's just first mover problem all the way down - so there's like a separate universe with a guy in it, and he's controlling our universe? And is his being controlled by third guy and so on?
I like Dennett's compatibilist view, if I understand it correctly: physical determinism is true, but "free will" is still a useful concept. The idea that "Oh no, physical determinism therefore it's unfair to lock people up cause they had no choice but to commit criming!" seems silly to me. If we had a robot running around shooting people, we'd still want to stop it, even if we knew for a fact there was no mind in there. In fact, we'd stop a car rolling downhill.
Sam Harris always seemed intellectually underpowered in this debate with Dennett.
Yep, entirely agreed. To my mind, science means testing hypotheses by doing experiments and looking at the results, but I guess that's better summaried by your word: empiricism. So I guess I don't know what the word science is even supposed to mean at this point.
I think the real takeaway is that the "real science" in areas like nutrition and even medicine is waaay, way less developed than what us nerdy types assume. They present themselves as "serious", and we take that to mean "special relativity" / "quantum mechanics" understanding-of-physics level refined knowledge and epistemology, but really they're at the "four elements make up the world" level of understanding. Basically: no one knows jack shit but it's called science so we take it seriously anyway.
Yep, agreed. It's fascinating that we can, in a sense, go to the moon medically (insane surgeries). But we don't really know how eating or sleeping works. I'm not very confident in exercise science, either.
There are very confident people in all these sciences, but they contradict each other, and their advice seems to work at best marginally, for some people.
Indeed, I was thinking of surgery as an exception in the back of my mind when I mentioned medicine. I wish we (society) could differentiate these fields better and be clearer about what we know and don't know. Why do we have to pretend all parts of medicine are as refined and effective as surgery? It's like some sort of society-wide taboo to suggest otherwise. Usually one response is "but it's the best we got" (meaning: shut up, and follow their advice). But if you frame it in the "four elements make up the world is the best theory we got" sense, you realize that the statement might technically be true, but still following any advice from it is likely to be worse than nothing. It's so wrong and misguided that you're better off not knowing about it. And that's insane.
I suspect all the people who don't actually know what they're doing are highly motivated to associate themselves with those who do. If everyone thinks physics is great, dress & talk like a physicist and you'll get credibility by osmosis.
Strongly held opinions doesn't equal good science...
It's a lot easier though :)
Yeah, I was really surprised by this when I was around forty. All my earlier contact with science was with physics and chemistry and maths.
I used to say "Alternative Medicine is an oxymoron. If it worked it would just be medicine". In fact I'm told I used to say that a lot.
I assumed that they were serious people, because they worked in the same places that my heroes worked, and they had the same sorts of letters after their names. But they really aren't. They don't follow obvious clues, they never check their assumptions.
No faith in medicine is ever going to survive contact with the medical literature.
My respect turned into a deep contempt, and over and over again I've been surprised to find that I've been erring on the side of insufficient contempt.
I actually think that most of what doctors know they know in spite of modern medical research. And there's no way to tell which of the things they know is actually true.
I do think they're improving though. They have at least noticed the "replication crisis".
I will be most interested to watch how the doubly-labelled water people react to this apparent failure of their method.
The right answer is: "Work out what happened, check it's real, make it reproducible, trace the mechanism, see if the method can be fixed, actually test it carefully this time, work out what of the pre-existing research can be rescued and what is just flat wrong, work out what theories are based on now false assumptions, retract everything, redo most of it, and republish a completely new set of conclusions."
Real sciences do this and they honour the people who showed them that they were broken. Pretend sciences don't.
Is that just a Tim Minchin line? Lol. A tinge of ginge on your-
Unfortunately, I think there's very little real science left in nutrition. Nutrition scientists I've talked to seem to be the least interested people I've ever met.
They hold the curious position that obesity is 1. completely understood & solved and 2. totally out of control & beyond repair.
E.g. it is widely "known" that every diet works, and everybody diets all the time, and nobody loses any weight.
Kevin Hall released a paper on how even losing weight is a failure, because nobody who loses weight can keep it off, because losing weight necessarily ruins your metabolism.
Now I happen to disagree with pretty much every step there, but the paper reads like an admission of defeat, a white flag.
At the same time, I've had Serious Professional PhD level nutrition Scientists on Twitter reply to me with "So what [about your stupid cream diet], lots of people effortlessly lose weight with weight diets." DO THEY THOUGH?
I can guarantee you, if somebody had found a way to levitate without the use of jet engines, the engineers and scientists in that field would be all over that guy. If it was common that individuals went on a weird diet and suddenly defied the laws of gravity, the answer would NOT be "so what."
> Is that just a Tim Minchin line?
Not as far as I know, I just instinctively speak in memorable quotations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDtVFDBZ2wA
Oh I see what you mean! That's a very old thought indeed. Certainly older than youtube videos and possibly older than Australia. I thought you meant the bit at the bottom. I can't believe you got me watching a video....
Thanks for the great reply. I completely agree.
A fault in your model is such a great opportunity for learning. Unfortunately I expect the reaction to be "it was just a small thing, the model was basically right in all the ways that matter, don't think too much about it we've fixed it now, case closed."
I wonder how we can talk about this or communicate this to our rational and science loving friends without it seeming like an anti-science position (when in fact the whole point is that we're pro science). I feel like I can't really express this view without it being taken as an attack on science itself or something.
> when in fact the whole point is that we're pro science
I don't think I *would* describe myself as pro-science. That's carrying all sorts of baggage these days.
I'm fascinated by physics, chemistry, mathematics and these days by biochemistry and I judge them mostly sound. There are many other fields that I don't think are necessarily truth-finding.
I'm pro-empiricism and I'm a reductionist. I have a strong feeling that the world should make sense in terms of its parts.
I'm emphatically not in favour of just anyone who's bought a white coat and does studies in a university. In fact I despise a lot of the social structures that call themselves sciences, precisely because they are stealing the honour owed to physics and chemistry while not doing the work.
I'd describe myself as a compatibilist materialist, not necessarily a reductionist. I think all things make sense, but I'm under the impression that there's a big gap between "can be explained" and "we can explain it" and it will likely always be there.
In a sense it's like Fermi's paradox: we discover more known unknowns than we solve at any given time, and likely always will, so our knowledge in the long term trends toward 0%.
Sure. It took damn near two thousand years to demonstrate that you can't square a circle. And we understand the rules of chess but we don't know who wins, and we may never know. The question is well posed, but the proof may not fit in the universe.
If "reductionist" means someone who believes that if we understand the parts then we understand the whole then I'm not one of those. They sound silly.
I mean something like: The whole behaves as if it was made up of its parts. There's nowhere to sneak magic in. "Processed foods" is not a natural category. There has to be a lower-level reason why they're bad.
Perhaps compatibilism is the right word. Free will and determinism are not irreconcilable. My mind is made of parts, and all the parts obey the laws of physics.
Yea I am of the same perspective here as you. I'd say categories don't exist in reality, only in the observer.
I assume materialism & causality is true because I literally cannot imagine the alternative. It's just first mover problem all the way down - so there's like a separate universe with a guy in it, and he's controlling our universe? And is his being controlled by third guy and so on?
I like Dennett's compatibilist view, if I understand it correctly: physical determinism is true, but "free will" is still a useful concept. The idea that "Oh no, physical determinism therefore it's unfair to lock people up cause they had no choice but to commit criming!" seems silly to me. If we had a robot running around shooting people, we'd still want to stop it, even if we knew for a fact there was no mind in there. In fact, we'd stop a car rolling downhill.
Sam Harris always seemed intellectually underpowered in this debate with Dennett.
Yep, entirely agreed. To my mind, science means testing hypotheses by doing experiments and looking at the results, but I guess that's better summaried by your word: empiricism. So I guess I don't know what the word science is even supposed to mean at this point.
Thank you very much for documenting your trials to ascertain the mechanisms behind weight loss.
I'm sure that there are many people who are fascinated reading of the various tests/trials you subject yourself to in order to understand this.
Thanks!