IlyaShpitser comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Gondolinian 15 December 2014 02:57AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (635)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: michael_b 29 January 2015 04:58:42PM *  2 points [-]

Yes. I spent a lot of time reviewing critiques of The China Study (TCS), including Minger's. At the end of it I came to the following conclusions.

  1. Nutrition science is extraordinarily nonlinear
  2. I'm definitely not qualified to deconstruct claims made about nutrition
  3. TCS critics don't seem very qualified either, especially when compared to the qualifications of the people advancing TCS
  4. There's no larger group of qualified people advancing a radically different approach

So, those are my reasons. I admit they're not very satisfying. I'm spoiled by fields where, once you grok the formal proof you can be highly confident that the claim is correct.

No such luck with something as squishy as nutrition, it would seem.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 29 January 2015 05:29:32PM 4 points [-]

General advice: learn causal inference. Getting strong causal claims empirically is not so simple...