

Survival of the Wrongest - anupj
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/survival_of_the_wrongest.php?page=all&print=true

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JohnsonB
I can't speak for the rest of the article, but this guy's take on low carb
diets is a bit...odd:

>Unfortunately, it’s an approach [Low carb diets] that leaves the vast
majority of frontline obesity experts gritting their teeth, because while the
strategy sometimes appears to hold up in studies, in the real world such
dieters are rarely able to keep the weight off—to say nothing of the potential
health risks of eating too much fat.

So he's saying that studies do support low carb diets having high efficacy
rates (for weight loss), but "in the real world" this doesn't pan out. What is
this unbiased, statistically significant source of data on "the real world"
that he's relying on? He's ruled out studies, and it's obviously not anecdotes
because that would be even worse. That basically just leaves intuition. He
then goes on to cite the risks of a high protein diet (while linking it as
high fat only) by linking to a WebMD article which appears to be written by an
unnamed author who has poorly collated the research on the issue and left out
major advances of our understanding of issues like cholesterol levels.

~~~
anonymous
I think he means that they work under controlled conditions, but it's hard to
replicate them in the real world environment. Can't go to most restaurants,
can't make a lot of dishes, can't do social gatherings, definitely need to
cook yourself everything you eat, and so on.

~~~
JohnsonB
That applies to any diet though, if the advice is good, but people don't
follow it, it's not the fault of the diet. The point is he is singling out low
carb diets as if it's the diet itself that is at fault, not just the common
problem of people not following through on a diet regimen.

~~~
rafcavallaro
It doesn't apply to any diet. For example, a simple caloric restriction diet
might simply require that you leave half of everything you're served on your
plate and never have seconds. This would allow you to eat anything in any
social context, just not as much. A low carb diet would require you to forego
the cake and ice cream entirely at your own child's birthday, etc.

~~~
Snoptic
Having a bite of cake is still low carb.

------
shokwave
It's all well and noble to say "health journalism is flawed, everything is
breathlessly reported as a breakthrough", but when you put Tara Parker-Pope
and Gary Taubes in the same category, you're committing more of the same
mistakes. There's nothing noble at all in shooting down _all_ of health
journalism.

He goes on to say:

"Worse still, health journalists are taking advantage of the wrongness
problem. Presented with a range of conflicting findings for almost any
interesting question, reporters are free to pick those that back up their
preferred thesis."

It appears that this author's preferred thesis is that when presented with
conflicting evidence, one should throw one's hands up in despair and do
whatever you want ("apply common sense liberally"), instead of some kind of
analysis of the evidence to find which side of the conflict is more reliable.

------
tokenadult
The previous submission of the canonical URL

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5019442>

received no discussion, but I think that's too bad, and I would love to see
discussion of this interesting article begin here.

------
jisaacstone
The problem with personal health news is that is is never news. A single study
that contradicts conventional wisdom or purports a new finding is not meant to
be digested by the general public.

Ideally such a study would be published in a medical journal, and other
researchers would then perform studies to corroborate or disprove the
original; After a sufficient amount of evidence is gather a systematic review
would be published, and the results of that would be distributed to doctors
and health advice reporters, who would present the information to the general
public in a clear, unified and easy-to-understand manner.

In a perfect world.

The reporting of every study only leads the general public to believe that
nothing is certain (because dissenting views are published) and not take any
of the advice seriously. It is almost as bad as politics.

~~~
tbrownaw
_Ideally such a study would be published in a medical journal, and other
researchers would then perform studies to corroborate or disprove the
original; After a sufficient amount of evidence is gather a systematic review
would be published, and the results of that would be distributed to doctors
and health advice reporters, who would present the information to the general
public in a clear, unified and easy-to-understand manner._

Ideally everyone would be rational, and honest, and have aligned interests,
and trust eachother enough to all outsource their critical thinking to
experts. Except... that sounds quite boring and I rather like being a
somewhat-independent individual instead of a single-purpose cell in a larger
collective organism/society.

 _The reporting of every study only leads the general public to believe that
nothing is certain (because dissenting views are published) and not take any
of the advice seriously._

Since things are in fact not certain, I would think this is a good thing?

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rm999
I think this is an important article for the HN crowd. Educated STEM people
usually have a strong devotion to science, but science very often fails at
revealing the truth (dangerously, in a misleading manner). The article points
out the problem isn't malice or incompetence, it's bad expectations.

To me, a critical analysis of research is often more valuable than the
research itself.

~~~
jkubicek
> To me, a critical analysis of research is often more valuable than the
> research itself.

Critical analysis of research _is_ science. I'm perpetually frustrated with
articles like this that seem to portray science as a failure by citing faulty
studies, ignoring the fact that everything is working as it should.

~~~
jkubicek
It bothers me to no end when people discuss "science" as if it were just one
of many options available. Science is the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of
truth is science. There are no alternatives.

~~~
tedunangst
Science is a means of pursuing the truth. People who read tea leaves also
believe they're pursuing the truth, but nobody would say that's science.

------
breadbox
Ben Goldacre's recent book "Bad Pharma" is all about how easy it is for
pharmaceutical research to go astray (and/or be led astray). I would recommend
it for anyone interested in the details of this thorny subject.

------
csense
If a p-value of .05 means a study's results are significant, then 20% of
studies will arrive at an incorrect conclusion through chance! If
counterintuitive conclusions make interesting articles, but negative results
are somewhat boring even to professional scientists, is it any real surprise
that the end result is a steady stream of dubious advice?

This argument was shamelessly paraphrased from XKCD [1].

[1] <http://xkcd.com/882/>

