Settled Science, Settled Interests, and the Rugged Individual

The mainstream media is starting to catch on.  When it comes to so called settled science, follow the money.

One example, the dogma that saturated fat causes heart disease is crumbling.

A recent Cambridge University analysis of 76 studies involving more than 650,000 people concluded, “The current evidence does not clearly support guidelines that [recommend]… low consumption of total saturated fats.”

Yet the American Heart Association (AHA), in its most recent dietary guidelines, held fast to the idea that we must all eat low-fat diets for optimal heart health. It’s a stance that—at the very best—is controversial, and at worst is dead wrong. As a practicing cardiologist for more than three decades, I agree with the latter—it’s dead wrong.

Why does the AHA cling to recommendations that fly in the face of scientific evidence? What I discovered was both eye-opening and disturbing. The AHA not only ignored all the other risk factors for heart disease, but it appointed someone with ties to Big Food and bizarre scientific beliefs to lead the guideline-writing panel—just the type of thing that undermines the public’s confidence in the medical community.

Bad science does not become received wisdom via conspiracy.  At least it rarely requires a conspiracy.  It usually begins with an attitude of altruism.  A group of people believe x is a problem or threat.  The group begins an organization to battle x.  The organization hires a staff to carry their message to the populace as a whole.  All of the sudden the people who are hired find their livelihood, retirement savings, ability to pay the mortgage, and Junior's tuition dependent upon x being viewed as a threat.

It is easier to create an organization than kill it after it has lost its usefulness.  It is a straightforward task to create a bureaucracy but as interests are collected around it, it is very difficult to curtail.

Science is complicated.  Your body is a complex system.  Don't buy the simple answer and for Zeus' sake remember that every human organization, corporation, non-profit, government, or religious is run by homo sapiens and, as such, is prone to every incentive, pious and perverse, and every thinking error as any other group of human beings.

The American Heart Association is as likely to be leading you astray for profit as Monsanto, global warming scientists as big coal, the Catholic Church as the Quakers. The root problem is not the kind of organization but that it is a human organization.

If it is human a human institution, it is run by humans.  Some may be more humane, more efficient, more just, or more responsive than others, but they remain utterly human.  We are a tribal species and we watch out for our own.  If you think scientists are any different, well, this time is never different..

If the scientific method can curtail the tribal tendencies of scientists.  If society's implementation of that method is not working isn't working, than we have a problem bigger than global warming, heart health, belief in evolution, or any other individual issue.  It is a crisis of integrity rooted in settled interests.

Organizations as tribes: differing cultures, differing tones, differing languages but one humanity underlying them all.

Concentration of power, in the form of any settled interest is a threat to every kind of liberty, including academic.  Concentration of power is a function not of fact but of concentration of belief and belief suffers as much from fad and fashion as anything else human.

I love this riddle featured in HBO's Game of Thrones:

Varys - "Power is a curious thing, my lord. Are you fond of riddles?"
Tyrion - "Why? Am I about to hear one?"
Varys - "Three great men sit in a room, a king, a priest and the rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives? Who dies?"
Tyrion - "Depends on the sellsword"
Varys - "Does it? He's not the crown, no gold, no favor with the gods"
Tyrion - "He's got the sword, the power of live and death"
Varys - "But if the swordsman's who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible: Joffrey, the executioner, or something else?"
Tyrion - "I have decided I don't like riddles"

(later)

Varys - "Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?"
Tyrion - "It has crossed my mind a time or two. The king, the priest, the rich man-who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword."
Varys - "And yet he is no one. He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel."
Tyrion - "That piece of steel is the power of life and death."
Varys - "Just so . . . yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?"
Tyrion - "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords."
Varys - "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey? Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor's Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard Stark do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or . . . another?"
Tyrion - "Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?"
Varys - "Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."
Tyrion - "So power is a mummer's trick?"
Varys - "A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And oft times a very small man can cast a very large shadow."
Tyrion - "Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I'd feel sad about it."

Belief drives us and belief is a very different thing from fact.  Belief about science drives us more than actual science.

Belief drove the Third Reich.  It drove Mao.  It inspired Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.  It was the strength of Abraham Lincoln.  Belief isn't bad.  It just is not science.  Well, there is that thing about the placebo effect I guess.

This is why it is important to never sign over the power of belief to another, not to a politician, not to a clergyman, not to a non-profit, not to a group of activists, nor a group of scientists.  Given too much trust, each will abuse it.

It is popular in some progressive circles to ridicule and dismiss belief in the rugged American individual.  So be it.  It is part myth, part truth, all belief.

But it is a myth that serves a purpose.  It is a belief that tempers all other beliefs and that makes it very valuable in my moral lexicon.  It tempers the tribalism that the species is so prone to act on.  It is the psychological tool that lowers the bar to abandon one tribe for another, to give up one set of settled beliefs earlier than they would otherwise.

In other words it is the power that gives the individual the ability to say, "I don't care what the experts say, I am calling it bullshit."

And that is a pretty important.

Sorry Neil deGrasse Tyson, only those with something to hide complain of "too many questions."