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."

Saturated Fat and "Settled Science"

They always claim to be on the side of "settled" truth.

Beware anyone who feels the need, in the name of science, to use shame in an attempt to shut down those who disagree.  As more and more studies call into question the link, thirty years after it was considered settled science, between saturated fat and heart disease, what other bits of received scientific wisdom might be up for question.

Of course I am alluding to the catastrophic warmists who fill the void left vacant by the death of that old time Puritan fundamentalism.  They, like Jonathon Edwards, believe that humanity hangs like a spider suspended by a thread in the hand of an angry god.  Once upon a time you might be sentenced to wear a scarlet letter or drowned as a witch for disrespecting the received wisdom of God's prophet.  Today too many direct questions and you are labeled a "denier."

This is not to say that eating bacon double cheese burgers everyday is good for your health or that burning dinosaur bones is without ecological consequence.  It only goes to demonstrate that complex systems, like the human body and global climate, are truly complex and attempts to simplify them lead to false conclusions.

It also demonstrates that those advocates who are the most strident, the most ready to overstate their case, should not be trusted with the power to govern our lives, or even to set the terms of public debate.  It matters little if the fundamentalism they espouse is Calvinist, Nurtitionist, Warmist; or any other human ideological classification, it all comes from the same place in the human heart.  Where there is the absence of humility there lies the seed that we must be dictated to, for our own good of course.

Culture, Policy, and Events

Unpersuadable

The two things I find most distasteful in a human being are actually closely related: self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Consequently, whatever the subject of debate is, I find plenty to be uneasy about. Conviction can be a beautiful thing, so long as it does not serve as an excuse to treated one's fellow homo sapiens as so many polluted lepers.

Will Storr investigates the tension between conviction and critical thinking farther than I ever will in his new book The Unpersuadables and runs into the problem that he A) knows he must be wrong about something but B) believes his opinions are right about everything. My answer would be humility, or, at least, the discipline of being polite to everyone. There is a detailed review over at Salon.com.

Such rumination undermines Storr’s faith in his convictions, rooted as they once were in the rather quaint confidence that human beings make up their minds rationally. Instead, exploring recent developments in neuroscience, he learns that we believe first — engaging mental models formed early in life and rarely amenable to change — and come up with the reasons for it afterward. By the now-familiar process of confirmation bias, we ignore what doesn’t support our most favored notions, and shine a brilliant spotlight on the ones that do. Our minds operate unconsciously to a flabbergasting degree, while our consciousness is forced to tag along after, cooking up convincing rationales. “We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket,” is Storr’s provocative conclusion.

The Abusive Self-Appointed Nannies

Among my uncritically held beliefs is that when your absence of humility blinds people, you should be held accountable. Not with jail time, public flogging or judicial maiming but public outing and shaming; and those who have faith-based opposition, including illegal activity, has slowed the development of Golden Rice should be ashamed.

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.
It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.

Everything has Trade-Offs

From War is Boring:

In 1969, the Soviet navy shocked the U.S. and NATO militaries with a new and incredibly capable submarine—one that could swim faster and dive deeper than anything else under the sea.But the seven high-tech-class submarines—able to reach 45 knots and 2,400 feet—were actually inferior where it really mattered. Their speed and depth-resistance came at the cost of noisy internal machinery that made them easy to detect … and destroy.

Libya Continues to Fall Apart

And we continue to try to manage it without risking anything to resolve it.

American Navy Seals have seized a North Korea-flagged tanker which had been loaded with crude oil at a rebel-held port in eastern Libya, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

"The Morning Glory is carrying a cargo of oil owned by the Libyan government's National Oil Company," said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. "The ship and its cargo were illicitly obtained from the Libyan port of Es Sider."

There were no casualties in the operation, which took place in international waters off the coast of Cyprus. The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Live better and live longer: correlation or causation?

Why should I care? Enjoy more muscle in the everyday and enjoy more everydays before that day when you do not.

New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.
The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of previous UCLA research led by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that found that building muscle mass is important in decreasing metabolic risk.

"As there is no gold-standard measure of body composition, several studies have addressed this question using different measurement techniques and have obtained different results," Srikanthan said. "So many studies on the mortality impact of obesity focus on BMI. Our study indicates that clinicians need to be focusing on ways to improve body composition, rather than on BMI alone, when counseling older adults on preventative health behaviors."