
Science’s Biggest Fail - Yhippa
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-fail
======
api
"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you
kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and
trust you?"

I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this
for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx
propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities,
the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust.

People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas
because those advancing those points of view _appear more credible than our
society 's institutions_. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default
-- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being
overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it
extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq
because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost
entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting
Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS?

Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone
trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far
worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of
the deepest negative emotions.

Edit:

Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex
Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they
have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often
subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in
protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things
"protest beliefs."

I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon.
He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this
-- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways
direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if
you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax
breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it
in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of
shrugged.

~~~
TTPrograms
The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to
interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a
terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is
perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail
order degrees trying to sell books.

If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that
they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to
start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives -
what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions
about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media
outlets?

~~~
api
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 dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever
communicated? Vastly and systematically exaggerating your knowledge and
certainty of something in order to present a "unified message to the public"
is dangerously close to just lying.

I also think science is much more vulnerable to corruption by moneyed
interests than many people will admit. Research payola is very real.

While I'm personally pretty convinced the CO2 problem is real, I do not blame
people from being skeptical when government-backed science and jet setting
rich do-gooders tell them they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a
reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly
perceive. It's particularly easy to understand in cases like China and India
where fossil fuel energy is lifting billions out of abject poverty. I could
afford to pay 3-4X for energy. A Chinese peasant or an American member of the
working poor can barely afford to pay 1.01X for energy.

~~~
loqi
Speaking of recommendations that lead to heart disease, three sarcastic cheers
for massively understating the risks associated with abstinence from alcohol.
Mostly I just hear "moderate consumption is associated with some health
benefits", which isn't anywhere close to conveying the findings (questionable,
as always!) that not drinking is almost as risky as "heavy" drinking.
Especially considering that you practically have to be a raging alcoholic to
fall into the "heavy" category.

~~~
tsotha
Adams has a good point relating to alcohol, though. They haven't been unable
to untangle correlation and causation. I used to be a "moderate drinker" until
I developed (unrelated) health problems that mean taking medication every day.
When I take my meds I can't drink. These health problems are statistically
likely to end me sooner than most people.

So I'm likely going to be in the "doesn't drink dies earlier than average"
column, but it has nothing to do with alcohol.

~~~
loqi
I'm sure that point is not lost on researchers, but yeah, factoring in the
effect of existing conditions is easier said than done correctly.

------
mcphage
Doing science is a lot like making sausages. There's a lot of conjecture,
hypothesizing, testing, making observations, generating theories, testing
those theories, throwing out the ones that don't hold up to repeatable
studies. I don't think nutrition is unique in that matter. Where it differs
from other sciences are:

1\. The general public is very interested in the results, and so there's a lot
of motivation for people to misunderstand or exaggerate the results in
conveying them to the general public.

2\. The connection between nutritional intake and results is very complicated,
and ties into pretty much everything about how a person lives. The data is
very noisy, and so it's hard to get good results. Other sciences, it's a lot
easier to get clean data.

And yet the needle moves forward, slowly. Ideas get refined, the details get
filled in, and bad ideas get tossed out. We go from "fat = bad" to "some fats
are bad and some are good". That's the natural progression of science. I'm
sorry Scott Adams doesn't like that's how science works, but it's the best
thing we've come up with so far.

~~~
api
Insufficient repetition is a huge problem in medical science. There is no
incentive to replicate existing studies, as it doesn't advance your career. A
related problem is that there is no incentive to publish negative results.

~~~
evv
Exactly. Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives
that drive it are wrong. Especially with medical science.

~~~
aetherson
You say that like "Science" is a thing. It's not. There is no platonic
"science" that exists independently of the human institutions actually doing
science. To imagine there is is to make science into a religion.

~~~
flurie
That's because you're unfortunately incorrect. There is a thing called
capital-s Science, distinct from lowercase-s science. The former is a
religion, just like you said, and the latter is merely an updating empirical
process. The former is what Scott Adams and most other people discussing the
article are talking about, and the latter is, hundreds of years later, so
banal that it doesn't merit discussion.

------
ohazi
"How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers
more often than right answers?"

You can start by teaching kids how real science is actually done in order to
get them to understand and trust the _process_ rather than the we-only-deal-
in-absolutes pop-news headlines.

~~~
erroneousfunk
Exactly. "Science" != "believing scientists"

There's a component of reading research papers, trying to understand other
people's work, etc., but, fundamentally, science works and moves forward
independent of "belief" \-- that's the whole point. You don't like that
"science" told you to drink 8 glasses of water a day, and now they're telling
you not to? Great, go read the research and figure out how much water you need
to drink in a day. Don't write a blog post harping on "science" because it
"lied" to you. That just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what science
actually is.

~~~
totony
What you say is false. Science is all about trust. There is way too much fraud
being done just for quick fame.

Who wrote those research paper you take for granted, scientists? Are you
saying that these papers are always right in what they affirm, or that, worst
case, their result cannot be forged?

------
themagician
The problem with the "science" around food and fitness is that there is an
underlying assumption that is wrong, and that assumption is this: There are
things that are inherently good for us.

Nothing belongs anywhere, and nothing exists on purpose. Nothing is "designed"
for us. So many diets and fitness fads tap into this idea of what is "natural"
and try to implicate that there are certain things we are supposed to do. That
the human body is "designed" to consume certain things in certain proportions.
When you think about it for a second it becomes obvious that this is patently
wrong.

Everyone is different. Everyone is going to be genetically predisposed to
certain conditions as a result of consuming certain things. There are some
things we all have in common (basic need for certain vitamins and minerals),
and there are certain things we know are bad for us. Our natural evolution has
lead to the current state of things, but our consumption habits, behavior and
understanding have now surpassed our natural evolution. Even when we try to
get back to our most primal it doesn't make sense, because even humans running
around 50,000 years ago eating berries weren't "designed" to do that. They
simply didn't die as a result of doing it before reaching sexual maturity.

We need to stop thinking about food as being good for us, as if we are going
to find some magic diet that works for everyone. It's never going to happen.
Our understanding of genetics and the human genome may lead us to a point in
the future were we have a better understanding of how our individual genetics
are affected by different foods—and we can synthesize substance or specific
diets that are optimal for each individual—but we will never reach a state
where we "figure it out." Why? Because there exists no correct answer.

~~~
samspot
This begs the question of why we consider the science of evolution to be so
trustworthy, while considering nutritional science untrustworthy. At least we
can experiment on nutritional science. Evolution has all the same headline-
grabbing power as nutrition.

Nutrition is actually what I think of when considering this. I am supposed to
take their word for it on this complex topic, but we can't even decide if eggs
are good or bad for us?

~~~
exelius
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 bacteria vary wildly from person to person. Some peoples' intestinal
bacteria are better at breaking down different types of fat, sugar or protein
than others. Some people are lactose intolerant. Slight variations in the
intestinal bacteria levels might even lead to obesity or other metabolic
disorders - we just don't know because nobody's found a good way to study it
yet.

The net is that the human body is far more complex an organism than I think
many people realize. DNA only tells part of the story. The entire way we
design studies and test hypotheses is practically prehistoric - there's so
much noise in the data that we can't pick out the signal because we don't even
know what to look for. We're getting better data - which is helping - but
we're still flying in the dark about this subject because there's no ethical
way to disassemble a living human and perform the types of horrible
experiments we can perform on machines or animals.

~~~
DanBC
> One big reason for this is that, ethically, we can't just go experiment on
> live humans

The US has an enormous prison population. They get fed for $2.50 per day.

Is it possible to recruit prisoners ethically to take part in diet research?

~~~
Fomite
Recruiting prisoners is actually a huge pain - they're one of several
protected categories (along with children and soldiers) based on the potential
that their "consent" isn't really all that consenting. In my mind, this exists
for good reason, but it does kill almost any study that doesn't absolutely
need to be conducted on prisoners for their own benefit.

------
Alupis
The problem is, most scientists say "We have evidence today to suggest ..."
and most average-joe's hear "This is the absolute truth and everything else is
wrong".

Science is an evolution. What's "right" today might be proven wrong tomorrow
(after more studies and research are done) -- and science is one of the only
fields that admits that they got it wrong previously.

Average-joe's just want someone to tell them "what is right" and leave it at
that. Unfortunately that's just not how good science works.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The problem is, most scientists say "We have evidence today to suggest ..."
> and most average-joe's hear "This is the absolute truth and everything else
> is wrong".

Well, the problem is perhaps more precisely that scientists say "We have
evidence to suggest...", and then _marketers and propagandists_ say "It is
proven that...", and that "Average Joes" mostly never hear what scientists
say, only what the marketers and propagandists say.

------
WalterBright
> science failed my parents generation with cigarettes

My father said that cigarettes were popularly called "coffin nails" when he
was a boy in the 1920s, and that doctors routinely advised their patients to
quit smoking. I've never heard of science advising people to smoke.

Any scientist who cut open a smoker and saw those black, puss-filled lungs
knew it wasn't good for you.

~~~
npsimons
This really, really pisses me off. It wasn't "science" that failed Adams'
parents' generation, it was the media that was bought out by the same PR firms
that are buying articles against global warming today[1][2]. There are issues
with science to be sure, and one should always be free to criticize and call
things out when one sees them, but this article is such garbage. You know
where 95% of the bullshit in diet and fitness comes from? Greedy snake oil
salespeople trying to make a quick buck off of desperate people looking for a
quick fix. It has absolutely nothing to do with "science".

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt)

[2] - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2014/06/26/the-
publi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2014/06/26/the-public-
relations-debate-about-global-warming-heats-up/)

------
astrodust
This really seems like confusing science with _science headlines_ in the
newspaper.

~~~
FreezerburnV
And yet, for a while now, the general "scientific consensus" has been "fat is
bad for you", while recently it seems to be changing to "wait, fat isn't as
terrible for you as we though, and could actually be quite healthy". I'm
pretty sure the "fat is bad for you" stuff wasn't just science headlines in a
newspaper for the past however many years. This is the main thing that he is
talking about, where something makes into the mainline, including doctors
telling people how to eat and live, and then suddenly people realize they had
it all wrong and that what has been prescribed for years is actually very bad
for you. Like cigarettes back in the day, (or even radiation and coke!) and
fatty food now.

EDIT: references for claims about cigarettes[0], radiation[1], and coke[2]
being said as good for you (though I think I may have exaggerated about
doctors recommending coke)

[0]
[http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a171_c5.jpg](http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a171_c5.jpg)

[1]
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Radium_therapy...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Radium_therapy_-_1913.jpg)

[2]
[http://www.vrouwen.nl/files/0/0/1/2/00121242.jpg](http://www.vrouwen.nl/files/0/0/1/2/00121242.jpg)

~~~
dragonwriter
> And yet, for a while now, the general "scientific consensus" has been "fat
> is bad for you",

No, it hasn't.

The general scientific consensus may have been that _most Americans are
consuming fat in general, and certain varieties of fat in particular, at
levels which are unhealthy_ , and therefore that _most Americans would be
better off reducing fat intake in general, and certain common varieties of fat
intake in particular_.

It may be that many people have overgeneralized this scientific consensus into
a popular misunderstanding of "fat = bad", but that, again, is mistaking
popular view (and the mass marketing of "low fat" products) with scientific
consensus.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And this has been shown to be unproven, right? That was all over this forum a
month ago - thousands of studies and no smoking gun. Fat isn't bad; obesity is
bad.

~~~
dragonwriter
> And this has been shown to be unproven, right?

On the specific issue of saturated fat and heart disease (saturated fat isn't
the only problem fat -- trans fats are also an issue), its been shown to be
more complicated than earlier thought; there's pretty strong evidence that
certain high-saturated-fat foodstuffs are associated with higher risk of heart
disease, but some large scale studies that seem to indicate that saturated
fats _overall_ do not appear to be (and there is some indication that certain
saturated fats may actually be beneficial to an extent.)

~~~
jerf
But you've given away Scott's point. We've been listening to how bad saturated
fat is for my entire lifetime pounded into the public with the maximum volume
science has available to it at the highest governmental and science authority
levels, and now, oops, mea culpa, it's more complicated than we thought, and
right now it's not exactly out of the question that "saturated fat" will be
entirely removed from the "bad thing" or even "consumed too much by Americans"
column in another 10 to 20 years.

No matter how upset you get about people being a bit glib about what the
consensus said (and frankly I'm not sure I couldn't establish "science said
saturated fat is bad, full stop" with just a bit more effort than I'm willing
to put in right now), you can't get out of the fact that the pounding was
apparently unjustified, and there's a nontrivial chance it was flat-out
_wrong_. Science and scientists shouldn't expect to escape from those decades
of being wrong at maximum volume and the corresponding vicious evils inflicted
on the world (because after all the US consensus has been exported all over
the world), and it would be utterly and completely irrational for me not to
update my beliefs based on this evidence.

~~~
msandford
Further one doesn't need to look very hard to find "proof" that the "fat =
bad" message is prevalent in society.

Go to the grocery store. Go to the dairy isle. Look at the various products.
If you can't find "low fat" or "light" versions of most of things there, I
would be dumbfounded.

If major corporations have picked up on the "low fat" movement then I think
it's fairly safe to say that it's prevalent in society.

------
ebbv
This is a pretty terrible post. Science didn't kick people in the balls for 20
years, the media did. The media pushed bogus results of bogus studies on
people, and overstates the case that "X is because of Y" on real studies who
do not make such strong claims themselves.

The media is responsible for people's distrust of science, because not only do
they push bogus claims, but they also push FUD as well. Particularly oil and
coal industry anti-climate change FUD for the past 20 years. That is precisely
why people doubt the scientific fact of global warming.

And yes I would prefer to live in a world where people defer to experts. It's
great that people have "pattern recognition" but trusting your own half-assed
judgment on an issue where there are experts who have studied something for 30
years is not "pattern recognition", it's hubris.

~~~
pjkundert
Actually, it would appear that scientists did, in fact, kick everyone in the
balls for 20 years:

[http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2014/6/the-s...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2014/6/the-
statistical-crisis-in-science/99999)

Perhaps it was accidental in most cases. However, in the field of medical
studies, the withholding of studies with negative outcomes (and their data)
could be rightly described as "highly unscrupulous" researcher behavior. And
this has apparently been de rigeur in medical studies for some time, and
continues today:

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/scandal...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/scandal-
drugs-trials-withheld-doctors-tamiflu)

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that published results are
near worthless, if those publishing results are allowed to withhold studies.
You just do studies until you get the results you want, and then publish that
one.

So, it is difficult to blame people for doubting things, when there is
evidence of widespread "hacking" of results by so-called scientists.

~~~
ebbv
There's a big difference between being able to find instances of people doing
this kind of thing, and widespread hacking of results. I think it's a given
that it goes on sometimes, especially in cases where there is financial motive
for doing so. But as far as it being a widespread issue? I have never seen
evidence of that.

~~~
Fomite
Beyond that, there's people actively working on ways to correct for
publication bias in meta-analysis, to the point that it's a pretty fundamental
aspect of any proper analysis.

------
protonfish
Science is a process of understanding the world. No process or tool has yet
been found to work better. When he insults science, he really means
"Scientific consensus." I agree that there are huge problems with this, as
consensus has little to do with science, and everything to do with mass media
and government agendas. Something as politically charged as food with
competing agendas of agriculture subsidies, environmental impacts, and public
health and welfare is bound to be so controversial as to resist a clear
message.

So Scott and I are in agreement about this: what the media and our leaders
have been, are, and will continue to tell of about nutrition is probably utter
nonsense. And in their attempts to shove their agenda down the public's
throats, they will wave around cherry-picked questionable "science" and accuse
their detractors of ignorance. That's how effective PR works.

I would see this as a failure of the press and our elected officials. Mr.
Adams sees it as a failure of science. But what is his alternative? I don't
know, but I do know that when somebody first tries to convince you that reason
and evidence are not to be trusted, what they want to convince you of is
probably not in your best interest.

~~~
calinet6
The main problem is really that people are not educated on what science is,
exactly. You hint at it by separating 'scientific consensus,' but I think it's
a deeper problem.

Science is not truth, and it does not produce facts; Science is the process of
getting it wrong over and over again and learning from it. Science is at its
core a profound respect and love of doubt and uncertainty, and the ability to
live and work inside that doubt with the aim of doing something productive
with what we do not yet know.

If people understood this one fact about science, they would be able to frame
these issues correctly, and see this "being wrong" as what it really is: the
expected function of an amazing process of advancement.

This is why I advocate for universal, complete, liberal arts education.
Scientific understanding and the humanity to know how to live with it. It's
our only hope.

------
ZeroGravitas
I found out recently that Scott Adams doesn't believe in evolution, which
rather colours my response to this headline.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams)

~~~
muaddirac
He has some odd ideas about science.

The end of his book "The Dilbert Future" calls for "new ways of looking at
existing things." And then claims that all of science is just "looking at
things" which, he points out, is pretty unreliable, and that we need to
improve our ability to perceive the universe in order to move forward in
science. Of note is that he doesn't consider technologies which enhance our
perception to be actually doing that (microscopes, telescopes, and other types
of sensors are just more forms of "seeing" to him, and are lacking).

He then rather poorly explains double slit experiment and suggests that the
arrow of time might just be a figment of your imagination, as well as the
motion of objects in general, and gravity.

He skirts around the idea that looking at existing ideas in new ways can be
important (who would deny that?) but then devolves into useless examples,
claiming that instead of gravity "existing", everything in the universe could
just be expanding at just the right rate to create the illusion of gravity. He
questions causal relationships and posits something no better than leibniz's
monads.

I've derailed a bit here, but man, that book irked me.

~~~
npsimons
_And then claims that all of science is just "looking at things"_

Well, at least he got _one_ thing correct. Mostly. Science _is_ a system for
generating a model of the world. It just also happens to be the best one we
have, insofar as it has generated the most accurate model of the universe to
date. Is it perfect? No. Should it be criticized? Yes, otherwise it won't
improve. Should we throw it out altogether? Perhaps that question should be
put to the literally billions of people whose lives have been saved and
improved by the results of science. Or not. Those same billions are probably
very badly informed about science, which is what Adams should be railing
against, not science itself.

~~~
muaddirac
I agree with you say but I just want to emphasize how much that is NOT what
Adams says in his book.

In the book, he _dismisses_ science because it's just looking at things and
our eyes can deceive us (he uses the example of thinking the earth was flat).

At the same time, he calls for expanding our "perception" of the world. But
the many, many ways in which science/technology have legitimately expanded our
perception of the universe are dismissed by him, because it's all "just
looking at things." A readout of a signal from a radio telescope is just
looking at things with our fallible eyes. A measurement of the voltage of a
battery is just looking at a readout of a voltmeter.

That is what is supremely frustrating with his view of science.

------
danans
I have a pet theory that half the reason that the public bought the overly
simplistic theory that fats are bad is due to the collision in English between
the word "fat" as a type of substance, and the common use of the word "fat" as
a pejorative adjective.

This has even affected some of my family members for whom English is a second
language, but who learned both meanings of the word simultaneously in the 80s
in the US. Some of them can't separate the concepts, no matter how hard I try
to explain to them that they are mostly unrelated.

EDIT: wording

~~~
protonfish
I think another reason people jumped all over it was vegetarianism - less fat
(especially saturated) equates to eating less meat. Whether you are a
vegetarian for environmental (raising meat requires much more resources) or
for ethical (PETA) you would want to latch on to the low fat thing because it
agreed with you.

------
hga
Two nits:

 _I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-
offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is
marketing, not science._

One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don't get a deficiency
disease.

 _I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day,
because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either._

I don't know about "crazy-large" amounts (and too water much will kill you),
but as far as I know, plus a little bit of time with Google just now, which
indicates this has been the "scientific consensus" since the time of
Hippocrates, unless you drink a fair amount, you're setting yourself up for
kidney stones. Which I can attest are no fun at all.

~~~
FreezerburnV
_One reason to take the latter is to make sure you don 't get a deficiency
disease._

And yet, what has started to come out (from what I understand and have read)
is that taking a straight up multivitamin or something isn't that helpful. The
general reason people seem to be finding being that the body doesn't absorb
the stuff in the pill you just took very well, meaning you really aren't
getting much benefit, if any, from taking said pill. Instead you would
actually want to eat things that give you the vitamins and minerals that the
body needs in order for it to be able to absorb those. Possibly including
something such as a healthy fat which would promote absorbing the good things
in stuff such as broccoli that much more. (again, from what I have read and
understand) This is the possible reasoning behind the article saying taking
multivitamins is marketing.

~~~
TillE
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.

~~~
brianwawok
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?

~~~
Zigurd
> _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.

------
VikingCoder
I really like Scott Adams, but I think he failed utterly on this post.

The problem is media. News programming is constantly looking for something to
breathlessly report, and is delighted to find one or more so-called experts
who will loudly extol / lambaste the latest findings.

If you look at the leading causes of death, understand your own history and
risks, and follow the advice of credible doctors, you'll be doing great. Most
of us don't do that, and then we scramble for fix-alls.

It's these silver-bullet, "all-x-is-bad, all-y-is-good, z-causes-cancer,
w-cures-cancer," reports that are jerking your chain.

------
tjradcliffe
There are two things to say about this:

1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic
hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any
imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it
necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it
is easy to wander around in the noise.

This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that
the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location.
They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution
is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect
Health.

2) Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative,
which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here:
[http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-
ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-
ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422907267&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem)

------
daeken
> Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is
> about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a
> common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is
> halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

This is asking the wrong question. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be done,
when weighing scientific claims to act on, not just saying "this is right" or
"this is wrong". If scientists are pretty sure that me eating an apple (for
instance) is a good thing, it costs me little in exchange for a decent
potential benefit.

This is why a scientifically literate populace is so incredibly important;
without it, you get this all-or-nothing hogwash that this article makes out to
be a good thing, for whatever reason.

------
Synaesthesia
The major problem is the influence of big corporations in funding studies and
promoting certain points of view for their own benefit. This is a huge problem
in the food industry and also the drugs and medicine business.

If you look at the history of the popularity of vitamins, orange juice, the
promotion of carbohydrates and sugars over fats and proteins etc.

Not a problem with Science per se.

~~~
fidotron
It's not just corporations. Science funding, generally, is far too tied to
producing results that fit with the preconceptions of the group with the
money. Combined with peer review being a frighteningly effective mechanism for
enforcing the status quo, and it's unsurprising that once an idea is
entrenched moving away becomes nearly impossible.

The underlying problem is an insufficient diversity in sources of funding for
science. Scientists are people, and most just want as safe a career as science
allows, which isn't very safe at all. Rocking the boat is, for them, a bad
idea.

~~~
jawns
This was essentially the argument Bill Maher used to defend his anti-
vaccination stance a few years ago: The government is heavily pushing
vaccines, and heavily funding vaccines, and he doesn't trust the government.
(Of course, one could counter that you don't need to trust the government to
know that vaccines have demonstrable efficacy and a very low incidence of
serious side effects.)

It's also the reason why I was, at first blush, rather suspicious when the
Gardasil vaccine came out a few years ago. It was heavily, and extremely
aggressively, marketed. And I know that vaccines don't tend to be moneymakers
in the way that blockbuster drugs are, but it definitely raised my eyebrows
that Gardasil was being marketed so aggressively, because of the reputation of
Big Pharma, where money often comes before ethics and due diligence.

------
kin
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 always too small or they always leave
out important human factors or they leave out the middle man of cause and
effect. When it comes to diet and nutrition I most definitely see a lot of bad
science out there.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Men's Health is not a scientific publication. The point is that nutrition is a
multi-billion dollar industry. That corrupts the science.

Hey I want to make a new product that X segment will like. Can you guys go
find some science that backs this up?

------
IanDrake
Someone must have just read "The big fat lie".

I could have written the same article after reading the book. A real eye
opener and I suspect a similar book will be written about climate science in
30 years.

------
supergeek133
I think a big problem is that science, by and large, doesn't control their
message. News media does.

Come to think of it, science related stories about what food is/isn't good for
you etc are the original clickbait. They're a headline, when the devil is
actually in the details.

A great example is why you hear that horrible list of side effects during
every prescription commercial. Once, during testing, someone got cancer.
Therefore, it's in theory possible cancer was caused by that medication,
however unlikely.

------
IvyMike
I'd argue that most human diet and fitness results aren't even 'science',
simply because you can't treat humans like lab rats.

The "experiments" we do are extremely limited in scope, and thus the results
are limited in scope. Sadly, the authority of "science" combined with the
desire to do something grand means that a lot of marginal, limited results get
turned into authoritative broad headlines. ("Scientists say eggs
bad^Hgood^Hbad")

------
threatofrain
I think the blame is on the fact that the scientific community does not have
much power in the media, and is instead the puppet of the news media. But then
again, all facts are puppets of the news station, made to be framed in any way
that fits into any kind of narrative.

The overwhelmingly dominant interface non-university people have with science
is through news media. How else are you going to get your facts? By going out
to different countries by yourself? By researching into all areas of interest?
That's insane.

The top four salient science media personalities are probably Bill Nye, Neil
Degrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Dr Phil. Though, I wouldn't say that any
of these people hold a candle to Bill 'O Reilly or Rush Limbaugh in terms of
influence over public attitudes and opinions on science, and that's the
problem.

Science, in the eyes of the many, is just another fact in a news media report,
and it can go any way the host or reporter wants it to.

Yes, science has been inconsistent. Yes, science media personalities have been
belligerent or not diplomatic on camera. Yes, there has been corruption of
metrics and statistics. But... it just doesn't hold a candle to Bill O'
Reilly. Or Sarah Palin, for that matter.

------
rail2rail
An exceedingly large number of people distrust science not because they've
been paying attention to it, but because someone told them to distrust it.
They couldn't care less about the rigor behind the science if it differs from
their own worldview. We have an enormous problem of flat out science rejection
in the US for no other reason than politics and religion.

------
hackuser
Despite the criticisms, the outcomes have been amazing. People are living
longer and healthier lives than they did 20 years ago. Is Adams also forgoing
vaccinations?

My impression is (but someone with actual knowledge please contribute here)
that modern medicine and science have achieved what no other institutions or
ideas in human history have achieved, significantly extending human life and
curing diseases that cursed humanity since the dawn of time. It is a miracle,
and it continues -- life expectancy continues to improve and more diseases are
coming under control of prevented (except measles, of course).

Scott Adams' cartoons are insightful; he does not seem to apply the same depth
of thought to his writing. This piece is poorly thought through. "Science" has
told him nothing, unless he reads the research himself. News about science,
and the public's poor grasp of uncertainty, risk, and the significance of
scientific research (i.e., is this one study? settled science? etc.) are what
generate confusion.

~~~
drumdance
If you read his latest book, he describes what I think is a very healthy view
of science and the notion of expertise in general. For certain classes of
problems, an expert will offer the right solution 98% of the time. But for
edge cases it's more like 50%.

I think there is a lot of conflicting science about nutrition (exacerbated by
advertising), and people assume it falls in the 98% certain category when
oftentimes it falls in the 50% category.

------
RA_Fisher
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](https://www.optimizely.com/statistics)).
You can read about it in The Cult of Statistical Significance
([http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-
Econ...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-
Economics/dp/0472050079)). This Economist video captures it solidly
([http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-
chart-2)).

The key component missing is a bias towards positive results. Most scientists
only have two statistics classes. In these classes they learn a number of
statistical tests, but much less how things can go wrong. Classic, "just
enough to be dangerous."

In order to cope, I have a personal set of criteria to make a quick first sort
of papers. It's a personal heuristic for quality. I assume some degree of
belief (Bayes, FTW!) that those that offer the full data set along side
conclusions feel confident in their own analysis. Also, if they're using
Bayesian methods, that they've had more than two stats classes. Finally, if
they do choose Frequentist methods, a power study tells me that they
understand the important finite nature of data in the context of asymptotic
models / assumptions.

I'd suspect that other statisticians feel this way, because I've heard that
privately --- what do you think of my criteria?

~~~
tjradcliffe
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](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.]

------
charlieflowers
It seems what is missing in nutrition is the ability to _measure the results
on your own individual body_ . For example, you can take a blood test, find
out you're deficient in vitamin D, supplement for a while, then take another
blood test and see results.

But you cannot do that for most things to do with nutrition. You can't check
your gut biome, see a problem, take a specific probiotic, then check again and
confirm improvement, because we don't understand the gut biome well enough
yet.

You can't do it with most supplements. And even when you can, we hardly ever
do. Insurance is not going to be a big fan of it.

You also can't do it with switching from margarine to butter, or drinking more
water, or whatever it is you think might help. Without some concrete
measurable change that you actually measure, you're taking shots in the dark.

I hope wearable devices can make some inroads here, at least for low hanging
fruit (easily measured, well-understood things).

------
snowwrestler
People trust science implicitly 1000 ways every day: when they get in their
car, when they check Facebook, when they step into an airplane, when they take
some Advil, when they eat a Snickers bar, when they take an antibiotic, when
they take Viagra, when they make a phone call, etc.

So the question is not "why don't people trust science," the question is "why
do people very selectively mistrust small segments of science?"

A plausible answer is because there are people and organizations who are
encouraging them to mistrust those small segments of science--by purposefully
feeding bad information into the marketplace of ideas.

I think Adams is making a fundamental error of attribution, blaming good
actors (real scientists) for the actions of bad actors. He's basically arguing
that unless scientists can stop all bad information from anyone, they can be
blamed for the bad information. Doesn't seem fair or sustainable.

------
TeMPOraL
I do see a kind of anti-induction thing going on, similar to what happens on
stock markets. In the case of science, when people trust research, we have all
kind of assholes[0] flocking to it and using it to push their agenda, up until
people don't trust science anymore. Come to think of it, this applies to all
kinds of things people trust.

The problem seems to be, people don't care about being lied to. Politicians
spew bullshit all the time, there's hardly a true fact you can find in a
newspaper, and yet everyone just goes "meh". There should be back-pressure.
Journalists should lose their jobs over lying to people, and that includes all
that nonsense science reporting that is killing trust in life-saving research.
But no one seems to care.

[0] - I honestly believe abusing people's trust in something is one of the
most dickish move you can pull.

------
JabavuAdams
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 -- but it
sounds good enough to use for marketing.

Done. There's precious little science in nutrition. Just follow the money.

EDIT> I remember the eighties and the beginning of the whole low-fat craze. It
was clearly a marketing push, not anything based on reputable science. Hey our
product contains Plutonium, but no fat. So, let's emphasize the positive.

~~~
olentangy
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.

~~~
JabavuAdams
I don't understand what you're trying to say.

------
myth_buster
Jeez, I think Scott Adams is barking up a wrong tree here. The reason science
has lost credibility is because of vested interest groups who put money into
labs so as to get a result tailor made for them. Just as pattern recognition
is one of our traits, fudging numbers and data is also up there. Add to it
marketing which uses psychology to draw on our strings and play humans as
puppets. I would be surprised if all this didn't amount to the fragmented
society that we currently live in.

Also Scott Adams is using very choosy topics to make his case against science
which may not hold true in generality. The difficulty of getting sugar rich
diet and drinks out of schools shows how obesity is not primarily due to lack
of credible science. This also applies to Tobacco. I think this whole blog is
a sensationalist piece which jumps from one extreme to another.

> I’m pro-science because the alternatives are worse. (Example: ISIS.)

ISIS is not an example of lack of science but an example of lack of empathy
and humanity.

I agree that the layman is not an idiot but there is a whole system built into
society to patronize them and to make him/her feel that way. People are
constantly told to rest their judgement and let the authorities tell them what
it implies. This happens right from childhood where parents for the fear of
being exposed of lacking knowledge on the topic use their authoritarian powers
to suppress curiosity. A child who is constantly being exposed to that
treatment will outsource his/her judgement for the ones put across by pundits
in the media when they grow up.

I think the "The Clean Room" episode [0] in NgT's COSMOS brings the fault in
our system quite effectively by showing how Clair Patterson had to battle
great odds to bring the ill effects of lead in Gasoline primarily because
there was a big vested interest group who were against it. It's available on
Netflix and I would recommend it highly.

[0]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3410940/?ref_=ttep_ep7](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3410940/?ref_=ttep_ep7)

~~~
codyb
He mentions privately funded scientific ventures being fudged often.

And if what you say is the case, you present a stronger reason for skepticism
of scientific claim than mere pattern recognition.

The piece is certainly sensationalist but it presents a valid point and tries
to offer a view of understanding of alternative viewpoints. Walking in other
people's shoes seems to be something many in the world have trouble doing.

I know I've certainly met some quite militant science folks who think everyone
who doesn't vehemently believe in the latest scientific concept is an idiot
because p < 0.05. That kind of attitude wins no hearts and changes no minds of
the "non believers".

~~~
myth_buster
> He mentions privately funded scientific ventures being fudged often.

He does it in a hand-wavy fashion. Its not that science is in the wrong, its
the system that is at fault. What is perhaps needed is to get influence of
money out of research as in with politics. Also perhaps more rigorous peer
reviewed papers and penalties for the media if they state rejected/falsified
theories as accepted ones.

> The piece is certainly sensationalist but it presents a valid point and
> tries to offer a view of understanding of alternative viewpoints.

The alternate viewpoint is the inability of humans to grasp large scales of
time, space and complexity. For example Global Warming had to be renamed as
Climate Change because many people took the science as faulty at the first
sign of plummeting temperatures at their location. Same can be said regarding
the arguments about evolution.

Weather predictions is a science which is often mocked because in general
people didn't understand the complexity of it. I was one of them. A prediction
of 40% rain on the next weekend which didn't materialize doesn't put the
science at fault, it just means the model requires a few more cycles of
evolution.

------
normloman
Science changes it's mind in light of new facts. That's why science is great.
I don't understand what the author wants from science? To make up it's mind?
That's not how science works!

~~~
kghose
My view would be to tone down the media hype. To get the message out in
proportion to the evidence for it rather than in proportion to the size of the
PR department of the university.

------
amass
Movements or fads like Avocado-based diets or the practice of drinking one
glass of alcohol a day are really hard to justify scientifically because the
human body has such a multitude of variables. It's almost impossible to test
the effects of such a diet ceteris paribus. So I'm not sure if "science" can
really be blamed. The general public wants a simple and easy solution, so the
"science headlines" are going to try to give such a solution with half-proven
theories and loosely-correlated results.

~~~
brianwawok
Not just a variable thing, also a time scale thing.

I put my hand in a fire, I get a burn right away. Pretty easy to know what
happened. Sure there were many variables. My shoes, my pants, the weather..
but pretty clear.

Drinking a drink a day may do something good. May do something bad. But both
those events happen in 20 years. Holy crap that is hard to tell! (but yes,
partially because it mixes with many variables).

There is also a part of science of "we all WANT what makes us happy to be
deemed healthy!". Decision affirmation rocks! So if there are 4 studies that
say a drink a day is bad for you, and 2 that say a drink a day is good - which
makes the newspaper? Coffee, chocolate, alcohol - all things people love, and
all affirmed by at least SOME studies out there. Awesome!

------
Diederich
Taking a step back.

The rate at which science has moved forward ever since there has been science
has increased far, far more than the average human life span.

Say, a few hundred years ago, it took science an average of X years to move
forward enough to know that it was wrong about something. X was on the order
of many human lifetimes.

Today, science is moving so much more quickly. It 'finds out' it's wrong, over
and over again, about a given topic, during a human's life span.

Add to that the increased number of humans who are science literate.

Add to that the total amount of 'bandwidth' between 'science' and people.

Here is yet another area where technology has left biologies ability to cope
in the dust.

In this case, there are some possible solutions, mentioned elsewhere in this
thread. Understanding what science actually means has never been more
important.

Here are my basic assumptions. Everything I believe is going to be proven
wrong, multiple times, over the course of the next decades. All we can do is
go forward, making sure what we do base our decisions on, every day, is the on
our best and most honest efforts, for this moment in time.

Note, I don't really think everything I believe will be proven wrong, in all
likelihood. It's just a starting point.

I understand my comments are skipping over a whole lot of important, relevant
and fundamentally broken things, many of which can and need to be fixed.

------
Mz
I think part of the problem is that the human race is like that story about
the six blind men and the elephant, where one guy argued it was like a spear
because he had only touched a tusk and another guy argued it was like a tree
trunk because he had touched a leg and so on. There are billions of people
here, each with their own unique experiences, their own little slice of the
truth. It is only reasonable that some think their piece is TRUE and attempts
to rebut their piece of the truth must be crazy or something.

When I look back on historical concepts of things, often, they are decent
mental models, given the limited information available. For example, Native
Americans of the Pacific North West thought that the world was a bit of land
floating on water in a bowl. This area is geologically active and when there
is an earthquake, water runs up onto the land, not unlike what would happen if
you floated something in water and then pushed down on one end with a finger,
tipping it. So it's a fairly good mental model for the limited information
available to them. It's not accurate given what we know today, but I think
it's disrespectful and a disservice to act like it is simply "dumb."

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to take seriously the piece of
the puzzle different people have and how to help people who see things very
differently communicate effectively. It's shockingly hard. Most people want to
insist, NOPE, you are an idiot and fucktard because I KNOW the elephant looks
just like a spear. I have experienced that first hand, by god!

The part that most frustrates me is that the people who are the worst about
this are often not the conspiracy theory "nuts" but the closed-minded folks
doing it in the name of "science."

------
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.)

~~~
msandford
>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.

Way to character assassinate man! Bravo! This "If you don't agree with me you
must be an idiot" kind of mentality does little to address the reality of the
world, and rather than advancing science, hinders it.

I'm a bit skeptical of global warming, anthropogenic climate change, etc not
because I want to bury my head in the sand, but because from my point of view
there's a HUGE echo chamber. I've read tons of papers which all basically
confirm the theory but precious little which tries to look for alternative
explanations. That feels awfully similar to the whole "fat is bad for you"
advice from the medical community and thus, I think Adams isn't too far off
base.

For example, there was a significant hiatus from warming for the last 10 years
or so when there "shouldn't have been" (whatever that means) and it's only
recently that some scientists have proven why.
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-
hea...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oceans-hid-the-heat-and-
slowed-pace-of-global-warming/)

That's a substantial part of the theory to be missing and yet still proclaim
that the original theory was totally great and not problematic at all.

Like you said: Cynicism, in some cases, is warranted.

~~~
shanusmagnus
First, I'd never say that not agreeing with me makes anyone an idiot. Not
agreeing with thousands of people from around the world whose entire
professional lives revolve around investigating these very issues, though,
requires a higher standard of evidence than your steely gaze and good old
horse sense.

But speaking of standards of evidence:

>>>> For example, there was a significant hiatus from warming for the last 10
years or so when there "shouldn't have been" (whatever that means) and it's
only recently that some scientists have proven why <<<<

The fact that you can't write down a model that predicts an extraordinarily
complicated system down to the last detail is a very poor standard of evidence
to require. It's the same flavor of argument that Big Tobacco used for all
those years to squirm through legal loopholes about whether or not they knew
that smoking killed people. I don't follow this literature but I'm not
surprised that nobody can explain the handful of 100 year old ladies who
smoked their whole lives and are as healthy as horses. The 'can you explain
_this_ then???' defense isn't much of a defense when viewed in context.

~~~
msandford
I've heard phrases like "the science is settled" on global warming. If you
can't write down a VERY detailed model on global warming, then it seems to me
pretty arrogant to suggest that in fact "the science is settled." The fact
that "Big Tobacco" hid behind that argument doesn't make it wrong! That kind
of thinking isn't terribly sound, all kinds of folks use various argumentation
strategies to advance various theories; not all of them are right. By your
logic that should eliminate all argumentation strategies from all pursuits
because all have been used in service of incorrect ideas. Since this is an
obviously ridiculous conclusion I would instead assume that your maxim isn't
valid.

Experts have been wrong in the past and will be again in the future.
Economists -- whose sole job it is to understand the economy -- do no better
than chance at predicting what will happen to GDP. You're making an appeal to
authority and it's not terribly convincing.
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-04/economic-forecasts-
no-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-04/economic-forecasts-no-better-
than-a-random-walk/4499098)

The science is largely settled on gravity and we've got an equation that tells
us how it works in excruciating detail.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation#Newton.27s_theory_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation#Newton.27s_theory_of_gravitation)

When climate science reaches that level of predictive ability then it won't be
terribly contentious to say that the science is settled. Until then, it may
well be.

~~~
snowwrestler
You don't need a very detailed model to understand anthropogenic global
warming, but you would need a detailed model to disprove it.

Once you understand that certain gases in the atmosphere act as a heat
reservoir, then the obvious hypothesis is that trapped heat will increase if
the amount of those gases increases. Since we know we're increasing some of
those gases by burning fossil fuels, we expect warming.

There are only 2 ways to disprove this hypothesis. One would be to disprove
the basic science of the greenhouse effect--not likely. The other would be to
show that there is another climatic process that counteracts the expected
warming. And to do that, you would need to create a more complicated model of
the climate.

This is what scientists have done, and they haven't found any effect that
fully counteracts the expected warming.

So just to be clear: computer models aren't important because they prove that
global warming is happening. Warming is the base assumption. Computer models
are important because they have failed to prove anything can stop it.

As for gravity, there is no analytical solution to the 3 body problem. NASA
still uses numerical simulation to model the solar system--just like a climate
model, but with many orders of magnitude fewer nodes and inputs. They can be
so precise because their model is so simple, not because of a fundamental
difference in scientific understanding.

~~~
msandford
The orders of magnitude more nodes and inputs mean that there are orders of
magnitude more opportunities for mistakes to be made in the models. It also
increases the likelihood of failing to find a confounding variable. The upper
bound on system complexity is factorial. I shouldn't need to explain how big
that is when you start talking about many orders of magnitude.

~~~
snowwrestler
That is why it is so difficult to predict the weather. But you don't need to
predict the weather to predict changes to the global climate.

Just like you don't need much of a model to predict that if a rogue planet
passed through the solar system, existing orbits would be perturbed.
Calculating the precise perturbations would be complex, but not predicting
their existence.

Likewise, it's difficult to predict exactly how more heat in the atmosphere
will change local weather. But it's not hard to predict that heat will build
up if the gases build up.

~~~
msandford
Just because you can make a simplification doesn't mean you have achieved
understanding. That understanding might be correct, or it might not. Even if
you think you know the error bars are small, that doesn't mean that they are.

Given that the earth has had temperature excursions of +4C and -4C in the past
100k years it seems that there are some kind of forces that keep the
temperature within that range. What are they? Climatologists are saying
"tipping points" and whatnot, but if you believe the very long climate history
as measured by proxies you would have to admit that there certainly SEEMS to
be something that stops the temperature from rising further, and something
that stops it from falling further. What are those mechanisms?

~~~
snowwrestler
That's what a planetary climate is: an energy equilibrium. But if a forcing or
feedback changes, the equilibrium will change.

The history of Earth's climate shows the limits of these changes, but that
doesn't mean there are guard rails keeping us safe. It's just a reflection of
the physical limits of the forcings and feedbacks. Our orbit only varies so
much. Our axial tilt only wobbles so much. The sun's output only varies so
much. The atmosphere can only hold so much water vapor at a given temperature.
Etc.

If the sun suddenly doubled in brightness, I doubt you would expect the
climate to still stay within that +/\- 4C range, right? Well, atmospheric
gases are also a forcing, one that we know we're changing. Granted--not at
that level, but change is change. Models help us think about the sensitivity
to that change, but the equilibrium must shift, somehow.

Anyway, the Earth's climate could stay well within that +/\- 4C range, and the
warming would still cause mankind a ton of trouble if it happens too fast.
Remember that these are global average energy levels...it doesn't take much to
raise sea level a troublesome amount, for example, especially since societies
have built right at the water line all over the world.

------
bglazer
My philosophy is this: Correlational nutritional studies should be trusted
because they are the only and therefore best source of verifiable information
on maintaining healthiness. They are, however, very noisy and each study in
isolation should therefore influence my choices very little. Meta-analyses
should be given more weight because they tend to smooth the noisiness.

Scott Adams bemoans the fact that the wildly varying conclusions of diet
science cause people's pattern recognition to conclude that this is not
trustworthy information.

However, the problem is not pattern recognition. The problem is the weight
that people give to signals. When each signal is given a weight of 1 or 0, the
pattern recognition will never converge on the underlying trend. The media and
the public must understand that some studies should be given more weight than
others.

Thus, scientists have a duty to communicate which studies should be most
influential. They CANT trust the media to this.

------
dkrich
I think there's a very real truth to what he's saying. I find myself wholly
skeptical whenever I hear about the results of any scientific discovery such
as a breakthrough in cancer research or diet/health issues.

Partly to blame are media outlets rushing to publish "definitive" results to
get a headline before overwhelming evidence that the results are in fact
conclusive before they are known to be. Also to blame are of course,
scientists themselves, who conduct faulty research and publish the results in
a conclusive manner prematurely as well.

That said, I think there's a distinction that needs to be made that Adams did
not at the end of the post. He says that people are skeptical as to whether
climate change is real due to the aforementioned credibility issues. I don't
think this is really true. Most rational people (I realize that there are many
who are not) do not dispute the existence of climate change. Any scan of
climate data over the past century or photos of receding glaciers can quickly
and conclusively show that climate change exists. What most people are
skeptical of (and something that I do not believe scientists have yet
convincingly proven) is that _humans_ are directly responsible for the climate
change. The climate of the earth was increasing prior to the industrial
revolution, so how much humans are to blame is very much a debatable point.

To qualify that, I have no vested interest in either side of that argument,
however as a skeptical person, I do not believe that there is convincing
evidence to support the claim. My father, who was a geologist and
climatologist had the same belief. I think for me the issue is that people,
scientists and reporters alike, have proven themselves to just not be that
smart. They lack credibility because they continue to make claims that are
shown to be false. How many reports did we hear that oil was going to spike to
$300/barrel and that the economy was on the brink of collapse? How'd that turn
out?

------
j0e1
I agree! In fact, except for the case of rock-solid proven theories, nascent
theories that make it to headlines are treated as truth and the ill-informed
seem to exhibit fanatical faith in them, forgetting that they are still
theories. Being skeptical to these could earn you the title of a fool
nowadays!

------
argos
I have a problem with science been "done"

Science is never done, or at least it shouldn't be. We create models and
update them or change them as we get more evidence and the technological
advancements allow us to perform better tests.

Gravity was not done with Newton. sure, it's a great model to explain how
objects are attracted to each other, but Einstein came alone and proved that
that the model was not correct and it made incorrect assumptions (constant
time for example).

I think that is the great misunderstanding. We expect science to give us final
answers. We expect it to study something and then be "done". But that is not
the case.

------
jakobegger
The biggest problem with Science is that it usually doesn't answer the
questions we actually want answered. The problem happens when we try to
extrapolate from scientific results. When we make claims about human nutrition
based on experiments with rats. That's when we run into trouble.

Usually the scientific answer should be "we don't know".

(That's also the reason why people run to some quack doctor and start taking
homeopathic remedies. You'll get answers there. Unfortunately, people trust
those giving answers more than those saying "I don't know".)

------
knice
Asking science to refute marketing claims is a huge distraction for science.

------
pvaldes
People don't need to trust science, they need to understand science. If you
did never have time for educate yourself and develop a real critical sense,
don't blame the other guys.

------
Yaa101
There is nothing wrong with science persé, the problem is the people working
in science, a lot of them are corrupt. Not often by birth are they corrupt but
mostly due to pressure by the ones handing science money, and it does not
matter if the donaters are government or private parties. Most donaters give
money to serve their goal and not to get neutral answers about how things
work. In other words, we the people should look into the mirror closly to get
the answer about why science is so corrupt.

------
S_A_P
I like the point made. I also think he touched upon another point that needs
fixing with the comment of "winged monkeys in the media".

Mainstream news is broken. Sure its possible to dig up a good/factually
accurate/balanced perspective story in some of the less visited corners of the
internet. But news mainly serves to validate someones politics more than real
reporting. This needs to change so that the media can earn back some
credibility as well.

------
pm
How much of a generation getting fat is attributable to institutionalised
science versus people divesting responsibility for what and how much they eat
and exercise?

------
temuze
People have always been pretty irrational about health. From the Greek beliefs
of bloodletting/leechs to Edyptian amulets to homeopathy, we've associated
taking X + some time => healthy.

But that's the thing - our health can improve after receiving bad or neutral
treatment because of time, which makes it really easy to confuse correlation
with causation. When it comes to health, we easily fall prey to placebo
effects.

------
kak9
The original research supporting "carbs are good, fats are bad" made such
trivial statistical errors it's kind of crazy.

------
cookiecaper
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".

------
jeffdavis
"Scientific consensus" is an oxymoron, because consensus is not a scientific
process.

Unless by "consensus" you mean that a lot of scientists have successfully
reproduced an experiment. But nobody ever means that.

That being said, scientists are often informed and educated, so their opinions
should be valued. But please take off the lab coat and call it an opinion.

------
dthal
Science has more and less reliable disciplines. In particular, in any field in
which meaningful experiments are difficult or impossible to perform, causality
will be hard to pin down. It just so happens that many of the topics the
public is most interested in - health and nutrition, psychology, economics
and, yes, climate - fall into that category.

------
faske
This is refreshing to hear that I am not the only one who see this happening
to the general public. This is a good video that explains how to determine
which "science" is trustworthy or not.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RXvBveht0)

------
wutbrodo
> But can we stop being surprised when people don’t believe science? Humans
> can’t turn off pattern recognition.

Jesus, I hate this line of thinking. It essentially boils down to "we're all
just monkeys". Pattern recognition is the same thing behind a lot of in-
practice racism[1], and yet no one would claim that one's actions should
reflect racism just because our basest instincts do. We have a frontal lobe
for a reason.

Similarly, I can be aware that science may be wrong and still understand that,
at this point in time, believing the alternatives has a higher chance of being
wrong. Modulo widespread issues in study methodology etc (which may be a
concern in some fields, but not really what this article is talking about),
the principles underlying the scientific method are actually pretty easy to
understand without any domain knowledge (of either the specific field or of
study design/stats/etc).

[1] It's a straightforward example of "pattern recognition" to reduce a person
to one of their most striking and visible physical characteristics, like skin
color, and then act towards them as a member of that group instead of a full,
multi-faceted person.

------
cookiecaper
The best demonstration of the fact that food science has failed, and the fact
that commercial influence is prevalent in modern science and academics, is
that obesity is still a significant global concern.

Almost everything you can buy at a grocery store in the United States has been
altered to make it more addictive. If you go to a store and buy the foods
labeled as healthy, you'll soon learn that they're not really that different
after all. If you go to a store determined to buy only food that is actually
healthy, you're limited practically exclusive to fruits and vegetables, and
even that is questionable since we don't know what type of chemical treatments
or preservatives have been applied.

"Make everyone eat only celery and go to the gym for 2 hours per day" is just
not going to work. It may be a nice fantasy but it is never going to solve the
obesity epidemic on a significant scale. Addictive ingredients have the side
effect of causing obesity and as long as that's true, people are going to be
cajoled into eating incorrectly at every turn, because everyone involved wants
to sell you more food.

The obesity epidemic is a result of scientific advancements that have allowed
us to acquire an unlimited amount of the most biologically desirable food
ingredients on a near-global scale. We can't go back in time and uninvent this
stuff, and we can't actually expect people to switch to a diet of 25 celery
sticks per day, so we need a scientific solution that solves the problem. And
there isn't one, because obesity doesn't really represent a commercial threat
to anyone in particular -- if anything, it creates new commercial opportunity
for another super-powerful industry in the U.S.: medicine.

Maybe the airline industry will fund a solution once people get too heavy to
be effectively carried by airplane.

------
Xcelerate
For me, science is synonymous with "predictability". By studying systems, you
can create models and theories that allow you to create a _prediction_ about
the future which can then be verified. The key to science is the verification
step (which is why supernatural concepts are not science; they've never been
confirmed or denied).

Based upon my definition, you may be wondering about something like the theory
of evolution, since evolution concerns the past (and progresses too slowly to
observe in the present). But the science in that field is still a future
prediction -- the nature of the prediction is that it just so happens to be
about the past. In other words, as new evidence emerges that explains what
happened in the past, we can compare this evidence to our prediction for what
kind of evidence we would find.

So, if science is prediction, then good science is "better" prediction. Then
what's the best science? Physics. Physics can make theoretical predictions
that match reality up to twelve decimal places. That's insane. The next best
science is chemistry, followed by biology, followed by nutrition and health
(as the article discusses), followed by psychology.

Does this mean that psychologists are not as intelligent as physicists? No, it
just means understanding quantum mechanics is far easier than understanding
how people work -- a view which I would hazard to guess most physicists would
confirm. Despite the fact that QM requires advanced math that few can
understand, the totality of information necessary to make predictions at a
subatomic level is very small in comparison to the amount of information
necessary to model a human (biologically or mentally). A few postulates, a few
mathematical definitions, some numerical methods, and BOOM -- twelve decimal
places of accuracy for the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron. One
textbook would be completely sufficient to describe this prediction and the
math behind it (although it may be kind of hard to read). On the other hand,
there's no way a highly predictive model of a human could fit in one book.

Unlike the elegant laws of physics, a human body is the result of millions of
years of all kinds of adaptive chaos and evolution. There's no pretty equation
that describes it.

My point with all this is that the public hears "science" and they lump all
science together. Instead, they should be educated on which fields of science
are the most predictive, and which are still in major development. In this
sense, they would have a better idea of what to trust when making decisions
for themselves.

------
thomasjudge
Part of the problem as I see it is this (and I only have a short amount of
time right now but I have a lot of thoughts on this):

Our paradigm for "science" is typically physics, in particular say newtonian
mechanics. Force, mass, acceleration. 100% predictable.

However, while human diet, nutrition, metabolism are ultimately based (in some
way) in physics, chemistry, biology, microbiology, diet and nutrition in the
individual case are incredibly complex and clearly not fully understood
phenomena.

So I think it is not exactly a failure of "science" or even the "media" at
work here, but a failure to understand (which neither science nor the media
has been particularly helpful on) the scope and LIMITATIONS of our knowledge
and theories.

------
tsotha
Heh heh. Economists would have the crown for being wrong the most often if not
for nutritionists.

------
cttet
Read the papers. The articles on news about "science" are only news.

------
dmfdmf
> So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when
> it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

Forget about the common citizen, the scientists themselves don't know when
science is "done". This is the problem of induction and most scientist are
completely ignorant of the issue because they dismiss epistemology and, more
generally, philosophy as nonsense. So they implicitly or explicitly substitute
"consensus" for truth which is a horrible mistake.

BTW, I don't agree that getting halfway is the same as being "wrong", science
is a process after all and unlike Zeno's paradox the state of scientific
knowledge is not always half-way to its target, Karl Popper's claims to the
contrary notwithstanding.

> I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what
> science says it is because the scientific consensus is high.

The problem here is complicated by government funding of science and positive
feedback that only "consensus" consistent research gets funding. Sure there is
window-dressing "opposition research" but its purpose is not the truth but to
justify the consensus. Science has become politicized by the use of government
money and that's why things such as global warming have become political hot
buttons. There is a lot of money and power at stake and people want to fly the
flag of "science" to achieve their political goals. When politics and science
mix, bad things result. cf. Soviet Union.

> And we all know that studies funded by private industry are suspect.

I think this true today but that it is wrong. The tacit, unspoken assumption
behind these suspicions is that government funding is NOT suspect and free
from all biases. I think that that is logically and historically false.
Certainly revealing ones funding is important because funding can be a source
of bias but in the end science should stand on its own merit regardless of the
source.

I think Scott Adams has named something that has been going on for decades now
which is that the American people rightfully no longer trust science and
scientists. Part of this mistrust is a product of the rising anti-technology
luddites, religion and the opposition to reason in the culture as he points
out. But like Adams I think that the distrust of science has also been earned
and I believe it is because of the politicization of science via government
funding. The leaked emails in Climategate revealed that maybe the scientists
were not being so objective after all. The clearest evidence of dishonesty
that I read was that in public the pro global-warming scientists would call
for the opposition to publish their results and arguments in peer reviewed
journals. In the background they were actively working to block the
publication of such research or boycott any journals that did so.

It is now considered "scientific" to dismiss your opponents with ad hom
"climate denier" labels, secretly politic to limit dissent and smear the
opposition as anti-science morons (the implication that Adams was addressing)
and using political marketing tricks like changing the name from "global
warming" to "climate change" to make the opposition look like fools. These are
the methods of a Karl Rove or James Carville not science nor scientists. This
is not science.

------
beloch
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.

------
enupten
I think Science to non-scientists becomes a matter of Religion, and for us who
actually do it, it becomes a matter of Philosophy/Spirituality - if you
forgive the medieval imagery of that sentence.

------
enupten
No wonder Homeopathy et.al are making a comeback.

------
hyperion2010
One reason for this is that the field of nutrition science is a complete
circle jerk. They, like many other fields, only peer review internally, they
have their pet hypotheses that they repeatedly validate with crappy statistics
(because that's the standard for the field!) and postdocs alsmost never come
from other fields. I read a piece detail this awhile back, can't seem to find
the link now.

