SGU Episode 502

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SGU Episode 502
February 21st 2015
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 501                      SGU 503
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
JD: Jennifer Dixon
Quote of the Week
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman, from the Rogers Commission report (Challenger explosion)
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Forgotten Superheroes of Science ()

• Katherine Johnson: Space scientist and mathematician for NASA calculated the flight trajectory for the first American in space.

News Items

Mammals vs Dinosaurs ()

• http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/13/meet-the-furry-jurassic-period-critters-that-outwitted-the-dinosaurs/

Scott Adams on Science (17:46)

• Scott Adams on Science and Nutrition

S: Speaking of how science works, we're going to move on to the next item. Did any of you guys read Scott Adams who's the author of Dilbert, he wrote a blog post recently about science and nutrition. Any of you guys read it?

JD: Mm hmm.

J: I did yes.

E: Yeah. Stick to cartooning.

S: So it's one of those things, it rubbed me the wrong way enough so I wrote a blog post about it. So he basically says that, he opens up, "What's is science's biggest fail of all time? I nominate everything about diet and fitness." And then he goes on a pretty sustained rant about how "science", without really defining what he means by that, has systematically misinformed the public over the past 50 years. He has a list, he says,

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin.

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.

I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now.

I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies.

S: And he goes on. I really thought it was a terrible article that systematically mischaracterised the history, how science works, how science is communicated. The whole time he essentially blames science, and he says people are justified in not trusting science because science has been so wrong, persistently wrong on the idea of nutrition. And then also he says that science was "cocky" and that when science is only half-way done with a topic it's still wrong and so it's not right until it's all the way right. So even when it's party-way done, it's going to be wrong right up until the point where it's completely done, basically.

E: Steve, these are all things we've heard in the past from people who are purely anti-science, pseudoscience.

S: Yup.

E: And just absolutely against the method of science itself.

JD: Well here's the deal...

E: It's nothing new, but it shows which camp he's in basically.

JD: If everything that I knew about those topics was solely based on reading the articles that I see online I'd have the same opinion as him. I mean that's how a lot of the information is presented to the general public online.

J: Right, so to describe what you're saying, like as an example, the press will pick up a study that is a very early study, as an example, right. So it's not fully cooked, there might be some good research in there or starting research to get somethign going, but it's not a conclusion, it's certainly not a body of work or 20 years of where you could say hey, OK look we've thoroughly tested this every which way, retested our premises and everything. So yes, that's why we keep reading news articles and then you're like, oh yeah a year later we found out that was complete nonsese because of this mistake they made or this mistake. So I agree with you, I can't blame the general public, if you're loosely following the science news you're going to see a lot of contradictions, a lot of changing of what the common beleif is, or at least what the latest and greatest information is.

S: Yeah. The problem is his bottom line characterisation is just completely misleading in my opinion. So the only thing he gets right is that there are a lot of popular misconceptions about diet and nutrition over the last 50 yeras. He's correct about that, but he blames, again, science, rather than putting the balme where it belongs. So part of the blame, in diet and nutrition, most of the blame in my opinion, sits in the lap of the self-help and diet industry. And there's an industry of books and diet plans that are essentially mis-information, that are disconnected from the actual sciece. But that's a huge industry. There's a lot of money in misinforming people about nutrition. I think a lot of it is in the lap of the supplement industry for the same reason. I think that a lot of it sits in the lap of the media for reporting preliminary studies, not putting studies into their proper context. Doing a bad job of science reporting. Now Adams mentions the media, but he calls the media "sciene's winged monkeys".

J: What the hell is he talking about?

E: Servants?

B: Oz, Wizard of Oz.

S: The media are the minions of science and so science still gets the fault for what the media is mis-reporting.

B: That's ridiculous.

J: Well wait, so is he saying there's a coordinated effort between science and the media? Because I ahve such an amazingly strong opposite opinion.

JD: Yeah.

S: Exactly.

E: He's treating science like, in the context of, like cranks treat big pharma or big food. Big science is out to get us, it's all a conspiracy and here's how they're doing it.

S: He's not saying it's a conspiracy, he's saying science is just cocky, and that they misrepresent preliminary findings that are ultimately wrong as if they're sure about them. He says this:

The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

S: So that's completely wrong. That is not how science progresses. If you read the actual scientific literature, if you read interviews with scientists who are being responsible and reasonably trying to communicate findings, they never say anything like we're totally sure the answer is X. It's like, at this point in time, evidence suggests that X may be the answer. That's what you get.

JD: Right.

J: But Steve, it's important to note here that the vast majority of the articles that you read about new scientific findings are not written by the scientists, they're written by people who read, hopefully read the press release or read the journal entry and they're reporting on it. And they're sensationalising it, and they're coming up with provocative headlines.

S: There's two issues here, Jay. One is his characterisation of how science progresses, which is incorrect. Science isn't wrong until it's completely done with the question, then it finally gets it right. Science is always coming up with approximations of reality, and those approximations get progressively more detailed, or higher resolution. So it's like X may still be right but it's more complicated than we thought, we now have to modify X with this new information Y, and then that may even need to get further modified. Now it is true that sometimes when you have to make actual bottom-line recommendations based on our current scientific understanding, you may make recommendations that are incorrect. That is true. So there's always a kernel of legitimacy here. It was true in the 70s and even into the 80s that the science suggested that dietary fat and cholesterol were a big problem and that you should really decrease total dietary fat, and then we learned, oh, no it's actually more important to adjust the ratio of HDL to LDL, so plant fats are good, animal fats are bad. And trans fats are bad, or whatever. So we modified the knowledge and that did change our bottom-line recommendations. So that's I think a more correct and nuanced view of how science progresses. But the other issue here is the communication of the science to the public and there, we've reported on this quite a bit, I do think this is largely the fault of a scientifically illiterate and lazy media but we also know that the press offices of universities are hugely to blame, and scientists themselves need to be doing a better job of communicating to their press offices and communicating to the media. So there's blame everywhere along the line, but it's not entirely in the lap of scientists, I think it's 80% in the media and then 20% in the scientists and the press offices that are not managing the media properly.

B: That's being generous to the media I think.

E: I think so too, yeah.

JD: You have to realise how much pressure there is for scientists when they're publishing. There's a lot of scientists who I think would take some issue with how their particular article is referenced in the media but with a click-baity title and a link that goes to their actual publication, they get money based on that, or their particular publication can get money based on that. Or if they're not getting money in the very least they're gettin citations which makes them more likely to be able to get additional funding down the road. And so those scientists don't spend a lot of their time, not all scientists I should say, don't spend a lot of their time advertising their particular specialty or whatever their paper is. They're probably, some of them are going to be OK with the fact that there are click-baity titles heading to it just because it leads to more money down the road for research.

S: Yeah, it's complicated. What's interesting is that Scott Adams himself left a comment on my blog.

B: No way!

S: It's always nice, I love it when people I write about actually come and engage.

J: That is awesome, so...

E: I think he's going to add a new character soon, to Dilbert.

S: Yeah, yeah I wouldni't be surprised.

B: Are you sure it was him?

S: Yeah, yeah. So he, the comment was very defensive.

B: Oh yeah!?

S: And it was childish, to be honest with you.

E: Childish?

B: Really?

S: Yeah. He says:

It seems you have misunderstood the article entirely, perhaps intentionally.

B: Oh, nice opener.

S: And then he said:

Or are you just an outragist?

S: yeah, I'm an outragist.

B: (laughs).

J: I have not heard that.

B: That's the first time I've heard that term.

S: He just tried to say that I misunderstood his article, that all he was saying was that scientists were not communicating well to the public. Which is not true. So I replied outlining my specific criticisms that he seemed not to understand, blaming science for misinformation, calling the media the winged monkeys of science, the way he characterised the recommendations. First of all, he actually blamed the obesety and diabetes epidemic on sciece, which is ridiculous. If you read... I actually, for a separate article I have been looking up 1950s educational videos, these are wonderful, I love watching those old school...

E: You mean like those black and white reels which are like, hey kids, let's talk about...

S: Yeah, yeah they're wonderful.

J: Yeah, used to watch them at high school.

B: Yeah, the best breakfast is bacon and hash browns (laughs).

E: Steak and eggs.

S: No, but it's all correct information. I mean the stuff about diet is all very diet, eat your fruits and vegetables, I mean it's basically correct.

B: The big picture, right.

S: Yeah, the big picture is correct. It's when you drill down to nuances where the science gets more complicated and there are shifting recommendations over the years. But you can't say that the bottom-line recommendations of 50 years ago led to obesety and diabetes. That's ridiculous. And again, the documents are there to show that that is silly. So anyway, he has not responded to my response to him. Usually when people liek that leave a comment it's a drive-by it's a one-off drive-by. They don't usually stay to engage but...

E: He left the field.

JD: It bums me out, I really liked him. Now, not so much.

J: You know I thought about it. I had plenty of time to think about this. You know, the guy is really good at being a comic cartoonist, right? He does a fantastic job, he's done it for a long time, I don't expect all celebrities to be pristine in their knowledge and understanding and have a nuanced understanding like we do, I think we have to just look at it like, yeah another celebrity or pseudo-celebrity that doesn't quite get it, I still appreciate his work, I'm not going to hate and do a ban on his work because I don't agree.

JD: Mmm yeah.

J: In a way I feel sorry for him to be honest with you. You know, he's trying, he's thinking, he's engaging, and I find that...

S: Well but Jay, if you read his articles, he has a history of being a provocative contrarian. Which whatever, you could say this is just for entertainment value or whatever, but it's of dubious value. And then, he could have engaged a little bit more maturely on my blog, to be honest with you.

E: I agree with that, yep.

S: Instead of being so defensive.

B: Jay, you're being too nice, he is so dead to me.

(laughter)

J: Dilbert is dead to you, man?

B: (laughs)

E: He's now Deadbert.

METI Controversy (30:53)

• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/plan-to-broadcast-messages-to-alien-worlds-leaves-cosmologists-worrying-10042555.html

Anderson Cooper Takes Down Dan Burton ()

• http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anderson-cooper-takes-down-dan-burton/

DNA Barcoding of Herbal Supplements ()

• http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/regulating-supplements/

Who's That Noisy ()

• Answer to last week: bearded seal

Dumbest Thing of the Week ()

• Dumbest statement of the week goes to the Food Babe: "There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever."

Science or Fiction ()

Item #1: Scientists carefully mapping the activity of the brain during speech find that Broca’s area, long thought to be responsible for speech output, is inactive during actual speech. Item #2: Scientists carefully mapping the activity of the brain during speech find that Broca’s area, long thought to be responsible for speech output, is inactive during actual speech. Item #3: A recent study finds that women with mild knee osteoarthritis benefit from high impact jumping exercises without adverse effects on their knees. https://www.jyu.fi/en/news/archive/2013/12/tiedote-2013-12-17-15-08-35-566973

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.' - Richard Feynman, from the Rogers Commission report (Challenger explosion)

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.

References