Vaniver comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 4: What Causes Obesity? - Less Wrong
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So, I’ve liked this series (and upvoted it), but I’ve had mixed feelings about the most recent post. It feels like this is verging dangerously close to “someone is wrong on the internet” (1) territory.
In particular, something that seems to me like a major failing is that I’m now 4 posts into a series on nutrition and I don’t know the right answer. I don’t even know your best guess as to the right answer. Without an executive summary on “the right answer to nutrition” this series has no actionable take away points. Its clear to me that a lot of research was done to write this series. The series would be more valuable if you shared the fruits of that research.
Actionability aside, not stating a view on what someone ought to conclude makes it hard to see just how wrong Taubes is or isn’t. Will following his advice kill me? (Taubes is a dangerous madman). Will following his advice cause me to gain weight or fail to lose weight? (Someone is wrong on the internet). Is Taubes directionally correct such that following his advice will cause me to lose weight but he overstates his case while taking rhetorical cheap shots at strawmen? (Someone is technically incorrect on the internet).
1: http://xkcd.com/386/
There seems to be pretty strong reason to think the right answer is "we don't know the right answer yet."
If you check out Guyenet's post (linked here, ChrisHallquist has linked it twice), he leads off with (paraphrased) "carb-free diets have worked for a lot of people, and that's great, but Taubes is wrong about the carbohydrate-insulin-hypothesis."
This article series began because the heuristic of "trust the expert consensus" was called into question, and Taubes came up as an opponent of the nutritional consensus, but it turns out that Taubes is mischaracterizing the expert consensus, even if he's not mischaracterizing the layman consensus (which, as you'd expect for laymen, is pretty bad). So that Taubes gets the expert consensus wrong is relevant to the meta-point of "trust the expert consensus."
That's something that should take less than 4 posts to spell out :)