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?
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.
The view on Fat moved a lot less than you might think.
People used to eat a lot of fat which we still think is a bad idea. More recently we found that eating too little fat was also a bad idea.
As to dietary guidelines, if you pick a target for a 2,000 calorie diet and someone on a 5,000 calorie a day diet tries to hit that same target there is a clear miscommunication going on. And yes, you can eat a relatively healthy 5,000 calorie a day diet if you’re tall and active enough. Or, you can rapidly become morbidly obese on 3k/day if you’re short and inactive.
PS: I would suggest to most people that they talk with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). Diet is far from a one size fit's all thing.
We used to think that eating too much saturated fats caused heart disease. We switched people onto different types of fats. Tragically, we switched people onto trans-fats which we know now are terrible.
The current advice (avoid saturated fat) is questioned by some calm scientists.
It's frustrating that shifting scientific advice provides space for fucking wingnuts to spout nonsense.
Shifting advice coupled with dogmatic and unflinching posturing of authority provides ample space for fucking wingnuts to spout nonsense.
It even works against religions -- this sort of thing led to the protestant reformation. "I am infallible, but the last Pope was wrong..." If you really look into the history of it, the protestants led by people like Calvin were often as bad as or worse than the Catholic Church and the understanding of theology was often quite crackpot. They gained power because the Mother Church discredited itself through hypocrisy, corruption, and self-contradiction.
Your post is full of the science that people no longer trust. There is plenty of evidence that fat doesn't cause weight gain or heart attacks, and that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss because it makes you hungry. I don't know the correct answer, but I know there is a lot of uncertainty now, and there seemed to be no uncertainty in the food pyramid days.
Right, and perhaps one of the biggest things to understand is that, while thermodynamics does apply to human exercise and consumption and is really easy to understand and reason about, the conclusions you get from that tend to be overly simplistic. The problem is a fallacy along the lines of "all humans are perfectly uniform, rational decision-makers." Instead different foods release different chemicals in your brain over different timelines, causing your cravings for food to be different.
Just to take the simplest case, there is something like a 20 minute delay between food hitting your stomach and any sort of satiety signal hitting your brain. So if you have an abundance of easy-to-eat food, then you may end up consuming more calories than someone who doesn't. (You could call this the "second bowl of cereal effect": when you've eaten a bowl of cereal and still feel hungry afterwards, it's because you ate too fast because you didn't want the cereal to get soggy.) Easy weight loss plan: cook your own meals, tasting along the way; by the time you're sitting down with the food you won't be quite so hungry.
And none of that picture has to do with calorie-counting. Calorie-counting is important if you can stick to it, but most people keeping informal calorie-counts will be victim to their cravings, and those cravings are dictated by parameters of the food other than the food's caloric content.
The current science does suggest eating too much fat is still bad.
EX: "The American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee strongly advises these fat guidelines for healthy Americans over age 2:
•Eating between 25 and 35 percent of your total daily calories as fats from foods like fish, nuts, and vegetable oils."
Note both the lower and upper bound. Eating say 75% of your daily calories as fat is generally a bad idea for most people. But so is limiting yourself to 1%.
PS: This is one of those cases where oversimplification can be harmful. But, while looking at people with extremely high fat diets demonstrated a problem the translation from limit to eliminate is what most people heard.
According to that page you need to lower saturated fat to 5%-6% of calories. I'm suggesting that current science does not support the connection between saturated fat and heart disease. Nor does current science support their recommendation to cut salt. The AHA recommendations have been a dietary disaster for 30 years because they suggest that low fat food can be eaten without consequence, which has led to a massive uptake in the consumption of sugar and processed carbohydrates. And it was largely based on bad science.
> According to that page you need to lower saturated fat to 5%-6% of calories. I'm suggesting that current science does not support the connection between saturated fat and heart disease.
Studies, including recent ones, show that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduces cardiovascular disease risk (IIRC, in both sexes, but moreso in men than women.) Mostly, what's changed is that we now also have evidence that replacing saturated fat with trans fat or carbohydrates is, at best, no better than just staying with saturated fat.
There is probably no harm replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, but that's not what happened based on decades of AHA and govt. recommendations. What happened was that people replaced saturated fat with simple carbohydrates and trans fats, got fat, and had heart attacks. Take a look the heart safe foods the AHA currently approves. Bagels, rice, tortillas, orange juice, potatoes, cheerios. It is a recipe for obesity and illness.
You can't just pigeonhole fats into three categories and be done.
Butyric acid and stearic acid are both saturated fatty acids, but they serve very different roles in the diet. Similarly, ALA and LA are both essential unsaturated fatty acids, but they compete for the same desaturating and lengthening enzymes in the body. So if you eat sufficient quantities of those fatty acids in the wrong ratio, you can still see symptoms of dietary deficiency. And different people produce different quantities of those enzymes or different variations with greater or lesser effectiveness.
The AHA made insufficiently informed recommendations, and the nonscientific population followed them, often by replacing animal-based fats with vegetable-based fats with vastly different fatty acid ratios.
These were sometimes chemically treated to turn them into trans-fats, which in a key-keyhole model of body chemistry is like bending a kink into the key to your front door, then jamming it into the lock with a hammer and forcing it with vise-grips every time you wanted into your house. The trans fats resembled saturated fats enough to be used in the same way, but that kink in the key would cause persistent damage.
And foods manufacturers also replaced fats with sugars and sodium salts, which caused different problems.
Different foods have different fat profiles, just as they have different protein profiles. Eggs and milk have amino acid ratios that very closely match what humans need, whereas beans and rice are insufficient in isolation, but complete in combination. Similarly, beef suet, pork lard, olive oil, coconut oil, and soybean oil have different fat profiles.
We still don't know what the "best fat" food is, like we know that poultry eggs are very nearly the "best protein" food. And "fat quality" might not even be as homogenous between individuals as it is for the amino acids.
Any recommendations at this time are almost certainly unfounded or unsupported by rigorous and repeatable research. You really have to do your own homework on this one, and avoid making any conclusions based on insufficient evidence.
> There is probably no harm replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, but that's not what happened based on decades of AHA and govt. recommendations.
One of the leading hypotheses is that omega-6 fat - which is a subcategory of polyunsaturated - is very very bad for you. So there is absolutely potential for harm in replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat.
Exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss (in order to burn the necessary calories, you'd have to be exercising all day long), but it is not uncommon for exercise to suppress appetite, thereby reducing the calories in component of the weight loss equation. Unless of course hunger signals are being ignored, as in the case of unconscious, binge, or comfort eating.
> Exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss (in order to burn the necessary calories, you'd have to be exercising all day long)
Assuming that you were in perfect calorie balance before, any additional exercise without additional calorie consumption will produce a calorie deficit. This may or may not produce weight loss depending on the exercise profile and a lot of other factors (including, IIRC, what and when you eat relative to when and how you exercise), since its possible to gain weight with a calorie deficit while if you are building muscle fat enough (since fat stores more energy per unit mass than muscle.)
To be sure, there are many factors. But going by what a lot of people do, they will get a workout of thirty minutes burning maybe 200-300 calories, then reward themselves with a Big Mac at 550 calories, and they probably already had a caloric intake in excess of maintenance (hence why they are exercising to lose weight, and more likely to go for that reward). Heck, even one Snickers[1] bar can counteract that workout. Not saying this is everyone, but it seems to be a common pattern: most people don't realize they need to control their intake, even if they don't reduce it, otherwise all the exercise in the world won't lead to weight loss.
> But going by what a lot of people do, they will get a workout of thirty minutes burning maybe 200-300 calories, then reward themselves with a Big Mac at 550 calories,
The effect of exercise plus an additional Big Mac does not reinforce the claim that "exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss", because "plus a Big Mac" is not "on its own".
> and they probably already had a caloric intake in excess of maintenance (hence why they are exercising to lose weight, and more likely to go for that reward)
The reason why they are exercising to lose weight is probably that they have a current weight above their desired weight. That doesn't mean that they have a current calorie surplus -- plenty of people seek to lose weight when their current weight is stable but above their desired weight.
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.
FYI: In regard to articles published in the Daily Mail about cancer research results, alcohol is still in the mixed camp, but leaning toward 'causes cancer'.
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.
"...they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive."
That's a tough one. From the perspective of a person whose livelihood depends on CO2-producing resources, or for whom the additional cost would push them into poverty, I can't blame them for feeling resistant - particularly when there is still debate as to the veracity, credibility and authenticity of the science. On the other hand, what if the climate scientists are correct? The idea that we must immediately take action or risk consequences ranging from disruption to extinction is terrifying.
It is my hope that rather than forcing a small segment of the population to fall on their swords for the rest of us, we could instead transition gently to alternatives. This requires that we heavily invest in research and development for renewable sources in addition to providing tax incentives so that this reaches price parity with fossil-fuel-derived energy. I think that's very doable, but it means making this a priority; this is why Palin's "drill baby, drill" instantly lost my vote.
And here is where the general population's mistrust in science makes us dig our own graves. You have all sorts of movements, from lobbies to NIMBYs to "environmentalist" organizations blocking transition to sustainable energy. And sadly, I just can't imagine a modern democracy really committing to an infrastructure project as big as rebuilding the power grid. We need more Elon Musks, who will push the right solutions in spite of the market, and in spite of what people say.
Honestly, I agree. In some ways when I think about the future I feel very hopeful; advancements in narrow AI and medical technology in particular are very easy to imagine as beneficial. Mostly though I feel very cynical and depressed by what appears to be the cultivation of ignorance as a virtue. I am convinced that we are fucked, barring a massive breakthrough in photovoltaic efficiency or nuclear fusion.
> Mostly though I feel very cynical and depressed by what appears to be the cultivation of ignorance as a virtue. I am convinced that we are fucked, barring a massive breakthrough in photovoltaic efficiency or nuclear fusion.
I share that. I actually suffered a short-term deppressive period because of that (as weird as it sounds, for few months I felt guilty and afraid whenever I turned on the gas stove). We have maybe 50 years to fix worldwide energy usage if we want to maintain a technological civilization, and so far every attempt at that seems to be torpedoed by a combination of lobbies and ignorant fear-mongering.
Maybe the better word for such people is 'practical'. Here in Iowa I see these boondoggle wind turbines being put up every day. They don't break even for decades. This 'sustainable' energy source is only sustained through federal subsidies. Makes you weep.
>I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated?
Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely without specificity) like it justifies something. When they do this, people get defensive. The "rejection of science" is the rejection of science as inviolable truth, dogma, religion, not the rejection of the continuing enterprise of cooperative human improvement.
If someone says "I can't even speak to someone who is anti-vax/anti-climate change/anti-same-sex marriage/etc", this is religiously motivated bigotry.
The anti-vax thing isn't even a science issue, it's fearmongering based on nothing. The burden of proof is on the people claiming all these different kinds of vaccines have negative effects.
I don't know why the hell you brought up marriage.
You have a point about people getting zealous about climate change, but I think that's a response to people's horrific innate reaction of doubling down when faced with evidence against something they believe.
The Science-as-religion movement, which I personally call fundamentalist positivism, is doing more harm to science than a million creationists and anti-vaccinationinsts and faith healers could possibly do. It undermines science from within by performing a kind of deep epistemological bait and switch -- replacing scientific epistemology at the root with religious epistemology while leaving the layers above superficially unchanged. Destroy it with fire.
I've seen this a handful of times, where someone with legit science credentials will say something like "the lesson of science is" and then follow it up with an entirely philosophical conclusion. Like "... there is no purpose to the universe" (that comes from Dr. Jerry Coyne.) I'm not aware of any scientific experiment or framework to test the hypothesis that there is or isn't a purpose to the universe, nor even the possibility of creating such an experiment. But a fairly well renowned scientist made that claim -- essentially a philosophical-religious claim -- under the label of science.
I wouldn't say that does more harm to science than creationists etc. Instead, I'd say it contributes to the same mentality. It treats science as a label for a certain belief system, rather than a label for a set of processes and the data/explanations tied to those processes. As you say, it replaces scientific epistemology with religious epistemology -- stripping away the thing that makes science universal, and replacing it with something that makes it tribal.
Well, the NSF, in order to assist with this effort, is now making 'outreach' a 20% graded portion of all grants. This is a HUGE step in the right direction, I think, galvanized by the shutdown 2 years ago. Finally, the eggheads saw that Sarah Palin decrying fruit fly research was not something to laugh at, but to be scared by.
That said, I am taking a grant writing course here in grad school, and have been specifically told that the 20% outreach portion is 'complete bull.' The grants are still graded on the feasibility portion and not much else. The PIs teaching the class were, to me at least (take it with a grain of salt), disdainful that they had to ever go out and justify their research to the general public whatsoever. I got the impression that they felt it was a gimmick to appease Washington. Their general reaction to the public, at least in one meeting, was of disinterest verging on contempt. Again, this was my read, and may be totally offbase.
> And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?
Well, we've seen lately an uptake in science evangelists like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Both have been around for a long while, building reputation, but as-of-late both have been on a full assault against fallacies perpetuated by the media and the like.
We need more publicly-accepted household-named science evangelists to promote science, how it works, it's principles, etc.
While pretty good about science, Neil Degrasse Tyson has aided in perpetuating misunderstandings of history and philosophy that make me shy away from supporting his work.
Thing is - the tribal caveman in us craves to hear from a wise man (or wise woman). We didn't evolve with that sort of thing being specialized. So, knowledge celebrities will be in an environment that encourages pontificating on subjects they aren't experts about.
I think that this is deeply wrong. "The Media" is a popular punching bag, but the media largely repeats what large institutions tells it. Journalists don't (for the most part) have the skills necessary to dive deep into scientific literature.
For every big "scientific" view that has an agenda behind it that either vastly overreaches the available research or lags decades behind the available research, you can generally point a finger at one or more corporations, government agencies, or not-for-profits.
GMO fearmongering? Largely environmentalist NFPs.
Breast cancer overdiagnosis? Largely cancer fundraising NFPs.
Nutritional science? Largely the government.
Let's tell pregnant women to live in a thick cocoon of craziness? Medical insurers.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that it's not the media's fault, because the media just blindly repeats whatever they're told. This is exactly why it's the media's fault!
If a journalist doesn't have the skills to understand what they're reporting on, then they shouldn't be reporting on it. We wouldn't put up with a report on Afghanistan that says the place is full of Arabs because the reporter was told that by some nutcase and couldn't be bothered to check the CIA World Fact Book before he went on the air, but we're constantly exposed to the scientific equivalent.
The world is an inherently confusing place. Media's job is to filter out the noise and present us with the signal. Instead, they just amplify it all, and we all know that amplifying a noisy signal doesn't really help.
I'm sorry, but you're holding the media to an impossible standard. This isn't about "checking the CIA World Fact Book," it's "Read dozens of dense studies that assume PhD-level study in the relevant fields."
The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda. If a reporter sees a press release about a new study in, say, the field of cancer, and they try to fact-check it, they're likely to go and talk to the American Cancer Society. Which, as it turns out, has a point of view about cancer that it promotes.
What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.
Interview some random scientist whose name they pulled out of a hat? That's not likely to help.
They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text. Research institution don't usually go saying they're 100% certain something is this-or-that and has huge implications for everything. It's the media outlets that add those things to the articles.
> What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.
Well, you're telling us that Reddit and Hacker News can do what journalists can't, even though people posting there are definitely not employed to fact-check things.
>They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text.
The problem there is that journalism has been decimated and they have to do something (to get clicks) to survive. I'm just pointing that out, not defending it.
> The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda.
This is true only of some media. For example, The New Yorker has a fact-checking department that holds their journalists to high standards. Reading their long-form articles, it is clear that the writers have taken the time to understand things deeply. Nobody writes a 10,000-word essay on science the night before on a deadline.
It's quite reasonable to expect a journalist reporting on science to read dozens of articles (or review papers) about a field and to interview many scientists. It's not hard to find people with that level of understanding in a field who would be happy to write public-facing magazine articles. Many of the best science writers do.
If they can't properly fact-check what they report, then what good are they? Any monkey with a laptop can regurgitate press releases these days. I suppose this is why traditional media is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
You know, I think that the job they do is pretty important, if also kind of far from the idealized view of the media as this almost omniscient gatekeeper institution.
If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful. Certainly I don't want to deal with a raw torrent of press releases. I want someone to filter them for me, if even lightly.
If the end result is not a one-stop shop for all the truth and accuracy in the world, well, that's unfortunate, but it also strikes me as life. It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And since those institutions-with-agendas are pushing their agendas in other ways than just through the media, we should probably try to address that problem at the root instead of just blaming journalists.
> It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What would be certainly possible though is for them to stop putting lies inside. Exaggerating claims and inventing linkbait nonsense actually requires work - work which shouldn't be done in the first place.
> If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful.
Its simple really, within a generation its just as likely they will flip on what is certain and what is uncertain so why is it not safe to wait?
There are a few things we are pretty much past the flip stage on, vaccines are one, smoking is another, but get much beyond that and its up in the air. Welcome to Woody Allen's Sleeper; hell he got it right on the phone company.
Then throw in, who watches the watchers, as in who polices those who claim to know. When you see government and education malfeasance everyday these institutions become even less likely to earn or hold the trust of the public
I think there's also a general problem with people interpreting what's communicated to them. They need great storytellers to get across the correct information with the correct nuances. Otherwise you get media institutions with bogus headlines and misleading quotes to build hype and panic. Fox News is notorious for this, but most media prefers to sell snake oil over science because people want a simple message. Unfortunately science is not always simple.
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?