Money and Finance
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
- Gary Taubes On Econtalk
Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why we get fat and the nature of evidence in a complex system. The current mainstream view is that we get fat because we eat too much and don't exercise enough. Taubes...
- 60 Minutes: Is Sugar Toxic?
Link .................... Related link: Sugar: The Bitter Truth Related previous posts: Authors@Google: Robert Lustig Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes Specialty Health Interviews Gary Taubes and Dr. Thomas Dayspring FiveBooks Interview: Gary Taubes...
- Fivebooks Interview: Gary Taubes On Dieting
Sticking to your new year’s resolutions? Still digesting Christmas lunch? Ignore the conventional advice on losing weight, says the science writer – what constitutes a healthy diet needs to be drastically re-evaluated....................Related books:...
- Gary Taubes: Catching Up On Lost Time - Part Ii
For Part 1, go HERE. When last we left off, the subject was the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity and why I find it so unconvincing and problematic. This post is going to address that issue by first discussing three new papers published on...
- The Farnam Street Blog Reviews “why We Get Fat” By Gary Taubes
Great review of a book that has been mentioned several times on this blog. Link to review: Why We Get Fat ……………….. Book: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It Related previous posts: Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes Gary Taubes Talk on Why...
Money and Finance
Gary Taubes blog post
Some very interesting thoughts from Taubes relating not just to health and obesity, but also to science and the drivers behind paradigm shifts in any field. A lot of what he is saying reminded me of things Steve Keen has talked about. While Taubes is questioning the validity of the calories-in/calories-out model of weight loss/gain (that is a massive simplification of his ideas, for the record), Keen is questioning the validity of neoclassical economics. Both are challenging the most conventional wisdom of the day, and both I think are worth paying close attention to, no matter which "side" you may currently find yourself on when it comes to these topics.
And by paradigm, I didn’t (and don’t) mean how the word is often bastardized nowadays to imply virtually any shift in thinking or technology, no matter how minor. I meant what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn defined as “scientific achievements that… provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers.” By a paradigm shift, Kuhn meant, for example, the shift from Ptolemaic astronomy, in which the sun circles the Earth, to Copernican astronomy, in which the opposite happens, not the replacement, say, of traditional standard-definition televisions with HD.
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This is why, as Kuhn explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his seminal thesis on paradigm shifts, the people who invariably do manage to shift scientific paradigms are “either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change… for obviously these are the men [or women, of course] who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”
So when a shift does happen, it’s almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off. This is one thing that makes this endeavor of figuring out who’s right or what’s right such a tricky one. Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won’t do it. And if outsiders or newcomers take on the task, they not only suffer from the charge that they lack credentials and so credibility, but their work de facto implies that they know something that the insiders don’t – hence, the idiocy implication.
This is why a common and understandable response to any challenge to the existing paradigm – to the conventional wisdom, in effect – from an outsider is this: “who the hell are you (or am I) to be questioning us? You’re not a member of the priesthood. Not an upper wizard of the stratosphere. You haven’t trained in the field. You haven’t proven yourself. You haven’t done, in effect, what we have done; you haven’t learned what we have learned. You didn’t have the necessary apprenticeship in the relevant arts. Bug off!” (Although, this is by no means a universal response, as this paper – “Obesity and Energy Balance – Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?” — published in July in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition demonstrates, taking my ideas and those of Robert Lustig’s and exploring the implications.)
This knee-jerk rejection is indeed a valid response, because most outsiders who challenge the conventional wisdom are dead wrong. Some huge majority are quacks – assuredly greater than 99 percent and we can probably add a few more 9s to this percentage and still be on the safe side.
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And here’s the challenge to both the scientist working in the field and the lay observer following along: how do we tell the difference between the one in a million times, say, that an outsider comes along and gets it right, and the other 999,999 quack-driven attempts? The numbers alone tell us that the best idea is always to bet against the outsider, that we’re always best served by ignoring him or her and getting back to science as usual (what Kuhn called “normal science”). The odds are enormously in our favor if we do so. But, still, when a paradigm is shifted, it’s going to be an outsider who does it, so keeping an open mind is a reasonably good idea, particularly when the evidence suggests such a shift is in order (see aforementioned obesity epidemic).
This leads to a second major problem with making these assessments – who’s right or what’s right. As Kuhn explained, shifting a paradigm includes not just providing a solution to the outstanding problems in the field, but a rethinking of the questions that are asked, the observations that are considered and how those observations are interpreted, and even the technologies that are used to answer the questions. In fact, often the problems that the new paradigm solves, the questions it answers, are not the problems and the questions that practitioners living in the old paradigm would have recognized as useful.
“Paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the direction essential for map-making,” wrote Kuhn. “In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture. Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions.”
As a result, Kuhn said, researchers on different sides of conflicting paradigms can barely discuss their differences in any meaningful way: “They will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms. In the partially circular arguments that regularly result, each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.”
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Taubes also links to and quotes from Feynman's lectures, which are available HERE.
Related books:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Character of Physical Law
Related previous posts:
Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes
Gary Taubes Talk on Why We Get Fat
Gary Taubes Interview with Jimmy Moore
The Scientist and the Stairmaster
- Gary Taubes On Econtalk
Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why we get fat and the nature of evidence in a complex system. The current mainstream view is that we get fat because we eat too much and don't exercise enough. Taubes...
- 60 Minutes: Is Sugar Toxic?
Link .................... Related link: Sugar: The Bitter Truth Related previous posts: Authors@Google: Robert Lustig Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes Specialty Health Interviews Gary Taubes and Dr. Thomas Dayspring FiveBooks Interview: Gary Taubes...
- Fivebooks Interview: Gary Taubes On Dieting
Sticking to your new year’s resolutions? Still digesting Christmas lunch? Ignore the conventional advice on losing weight, says the science writer – what constitutes a healthy diet needs to be drastically re-evaluated....................Related books:...
- Gary Taubes: Catching Up On Lost Time - Part Ii
For Part 1, go HERE. When last we left off, the subject was the food reward/palatability hypothesis of obesity and why I find it so unconvincing and problematic. This post is going to address that issue by first discussing three new papers published on...
- The Farnam Street Blog Reviews “why We Get Fat” By Gary Taubes
Great review of a book that has been mentioned several times on this blog. Link to review: Why We Get Fat ……………….. Book: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It Related previous posts: Is Sugar Toxic? - By Gary Taubes Gary Taubes Talk on Why...