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Eugine_Nier comments on Alternative Places to Get Ideas (Also, "In Defense of Food") - Less Wrong
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We have to be careful when thinking about "science" as a single entity; the science that physicists do, the science that biologists, and the science that nutritionists do are each very different.
My take on what happened to nutrition science is that the nutrition science research community settled on a paradigm (controlled dietary studies followed by measuring indirect proxies for health) that was inadequate. They then put out a bunch of studies, each of which was only very weak evidence and had an extraordinarily long list of caveats. This got amplified first by reporting p-values which failed to account for those caveats, and then again by the media; and the result was a bunch of dietary recommendations that were some combination of noise, echo chamber effects, and deliberate manipulation, with barely any signal.
But that isn't a failure of science, per se. That's a failure of the research and publication methodologies of one particular field. It is concerning that other fields are using similar publication methodologies (especially the use of p-values), and there are some other fields where there is reason to suspect that the signal to noise ratio is also bad. The lesson I take from nutrition science is that you can't trust a community's output just because they call their work "science" and have all the trappings thereof; you have to look closely, see if it makes sense, and see how far above the noise floor their models' predictions really are.
There is a decent talk "Big Fat Fiasco" (about an hour long) that explains what happened with nutrition science.
Some of the interesting parts are near the end of part 2/start of part 3:
Specifically senator McGovern dismissing complaints from scientists that there was not enough evidence that fat caused hear disease by saying:
A little latter the video mentions that at the time 90% of all funding for research on heart disease was provided by the US Government and American Heart Association. Thus once both said that fat causes heart disease it was nearly impossible for scientists who got conflicting reports to get funding.
Edited conclusion to make it clearer:
There are two problems here:
1) The attitude that this area is too important to wait for "every last shred of evidence" and thus we must go with science based upon weak evidence.
Where else have I heard this, which appears to be prevalent in climate science and pandemic medicine today.
2) Nearly all funding provided by a few large organizations that are thus subject to politics and group think.
This appears to be true in most sciences today.
As such, unfortunately, it appears the case nutrition science isn't just an isolated incident.
I suppose the lesson here is that an inability to wait until all evidence is in to being to act does not imply that you should stop investigating new evidence once you begin to act.
The problem is that once you begin to act you're subject to commitment bias. Namely, as happened in the example, you have a psychological and possibly institutional commitment to the correctness of the theory you're acting under.
I think not waiting for every last shred of evidence is the root of Bayesian thinking and is also the justification for considering there will be a singularity and that there are existential risks that we can do something about now. Well before the last shred of evidence is even remotely in sight.
The last shred of evidence about existential risks is one of them killing everyone.