I'm a fifth year med student from Finland, a long time lurker, and you provoked me to post the first time. Thank you for that, I'm a terrible procrastinator. I'm a also big fan of many of your submissions. The alcohol fact seems right and the other two I can't comment on, so I'll focus on cholesterol. In this case I'm surprised of seeing no criticism.
If the information you present about cholesterol is true, I am highly surprised too, and I hope you're right because otherwise the information is potentially very deadly. The effect, whatever the direction, is amplified by you being a high status member of this community. If there were no other comments on this, I wouldn't bother either.
I would like to see the sources that REALLY changed your mind, and the link you provide doesn't seem to contain any good sources at a glance. The post that Kresser links to has sources that are ancient. I looked up on Chris Kresser, and he is a licenced acupuncturist trained in some version of chinese medicine. This doesn't exactly make me trust him as a source of medical information.
From what I've read, in big-name medical journals you can find that the case about cholesterol is hardly settled for good, but the mainstream medical opinion still is that LDL is very bad for you. Pretty much all mainstream arterial disease risk calculators implement this fact. If I have a patient who has high cholesterol and I don't react, I'm considered a bad doctor by at least 99 % of my colleagues and every single one of my professors. Every textbook I know of can tell you that LDL is bad for you. The only doctor in my country that I know of who recommends raising your LDL is a quack selling overpriced supplements. This is the level of consensus at least in Finland.
How am I supposed to update? Edit: see in the following comments how difficult this is Distrusting my entire field in my country in any circumstance doesn't seem feasible. Understand that I'm not a scientist, and not trained in statistics. I'm a doctor and trained to implement science. I think this is the most feasible division of work given the volume of current knowledge. Currently my time is spent at lectures, at the clinic and reading textbooks, and reading journals doesn't seem like a low hanging fruit most of the time.
Please provide proper sources before you spread any medical information. If your provide the goodies, I'm ready to read. Otherwise as an extortion I will treat my future patients with statins like the rest of the medical community :P
This is an important topic to me, and as I said misinformation is deadly. I hope you can forgive whatever indignation I couldn't eliminate.
A couple of sources that medical people consider reliable: www.cochrane.org, heart disease The Framingham Heart Study
Yes, I understand your indignation and I should not have been as quick to spurt that out without more information. I've tried to justify everything I've said above with data from Framingham and the Cochrane Collaboration, but I hope you'll forgive me if I have to lapse into a few sources from less hallowed publications once in a while.
"Eating cholesterol doesn't cause high blood cholesterol."
Since only citing things from Framingham or Cochrane is a hard constraint to keep I am forced to commit the minor sin of citing a work not published in a pee...
Information that surprises you is interesting as it exposes where you have been miscalibrated, and allows you to correct for that.
I suspect the users of LessWrong have fairly similar beliefs, so it is probable that information that has surprised you would surprise others here, so it would be useful for them if you shared them.
Example: In a discussion with a friend recently I realised I had massively miscalibrated on the percentage of the UK population who shared my beliefs on certain subjects, in general the population was far more conservative than I had expected.
In retrospect I was assuming my own personal experience was more representative than it was, even when attempting to correct for that.