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Lumifer comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - Less Wrong
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When the topic is an important one, like health and nutrition, I'll go learn about the topic.
I'm skeptical this is a great strategy for topics in general.
Nutrition, for example, doesn't appear to be the kind of topic where you can just learn its axioms and build up an optimal human diet from first principles. It's far too complicated.
Instead you need substantial education, training, experience and access, as well as a community that can help you support and refine your ideas. You need to gather evidence, you need to learn how to determine the quality of the evidence you've gathered, and you need to propose reasonable stories that fit the evidence.
Since I haven't made health and nutrition my career most of these things will be hard or even impossible for me to come by. As such, my confidence in the quality of any amateur conclusions I come to must necessarily be low.
So, the most reasonable thing for me to do is trust authorities when it comes to nutrition.
And rightly so :-) This is an approach that should be reserved for important topics.
I think you're setting the bar too high. What you describe will allow one to produce new research and that's not the goal here. All you need to be able to do is to pass a judgement on conflicting claims -- that's much easier than gathering evidence and proposing stories.
In nutrition, for example, a lot of claims are contested and not by crackpots. Highly qualified people strongly disagree about basic issues, for example, the effects of dietary saturated fat. I am saying that you should read the arguments of both sides and form your opinion about them -- not that you should apply to the NIH for a grant to do a definitive study.
Of course that means reading the actual papers, not dumbed down advice for hoi polloi.
By "learn", I assume you mean read existing literature on the topic. In the case of health and nutrition (and most other medical topics), high-quality literature is rather sparse, both because of frequently bad statistical analyses and the fact that practically no one releases their raw data--only the results. (Seriously, what's up with that?)
Also around the topic, not to mention that learning necessarily involves a fair amount of one's own thinking.
I agree which makes relying of authority (and, usually, on mass media reinterpretations of authority) particularly suspect.
I think the usual explanation is privacy and medical ethics, but my cynical mind readily suggests that it's much harder to critique a study if you can't see the data...
Given that the experts in the field are precisely those learning from and producing that same literature, the fact that the literature is generally low-quality doesn't make me more inclined to trust them. (Though, as bad as academic nutrition science is, conventional wisdom and pop nutrition science seem to be worse.)
It does make it exceptionally hard to gain a good understanding of the field yourself, though. Unlike Lumifer, I'd say the correct move, unless you are yourself a nutritionist or a fitness nerd or otherwise inclined to spend a large portion of your life on this, is to reserve judgment.
In terms of statistics and data, yes, the papers they produce are fairly low-quality. In terms of domain-specific knowledge, however, I'd trust an expert over pretty much anyone else. That being said, I do agree with you here:
Although I prefer trusting expert authority to making my own judgments on unfamiliar topics, gaining a good-enough understanding to figure out which experts to trust is still hard, especially with so many conflicting conclusions out there. This being the case, the strategy you propose--reserve judgment--is precisely what I do.
That doesn't help you when experts disagree.
You can't -- you've got to eat each day :-/
Ah, the old "choosing not to choose is itself a choice" move. Never was too convinced by that.
You can reserve judgment on the theory while taking some default stance on the practical issue. Depending on where you're standing this might mean the standard diet for your culture (probably suboptimal, but arguably less suboptimal than whatever random permutations you might apply to it), or "common sense" (which I'm skeptical of in some ways, but it probably picks some low-hanging fruit), or imitating people or populations with empirically good results (the "Mediterranean diet" is a persistently popular target), or adopting a cautious stance toward dietary innovations from the last forty years or so (about when the obesity epidemic started taking off).
It looks obviously true to me.
Your stance is a choice nevertheless and it necessary implies a particular theory of nutrition (even if that theory is not academically recognized and might be as simple as "eating whatever everyone else eats can't be that bad").
It's an option -- a point in a configuration space -- but not a random option. The default is, almost tautologically, a stable equilibrium, while in a sufficiently complicated system almost all possible choices may move you away from that equilibrium in ways you don't want.
Nutrition is a very complicated system. Of course, its fitness landscape might be friendlier than I'm giving it credit for here, but I don't have any particular reason to assume that it is.
Well, of course. Where does the idea of a random choice even come from?
If by "default" you mean "whatever most people around me eat", then no, not necessarily. Food changes. Examples would be the introduction of white rice (hence, beriberi) or mercury-polluted fish.
There is also the issue of the proper metric. If you want to optimize for health and longevity, there is no particular reason to consider the "default" to be close to optimal.
I certainly agree.
If you don't have much good information about what the fitness landscape looks like -- for example, if the literature is opaque and often contradictory -- then there's going to be a lot of randomness in the effects of any choices you make. It's not random in the sense of a blind jump into the depths of the fitness landscape -- the very concept of what counts as "food", for example, screens off quite a bit -- but even if the steps are short, you don't know if you're going to be climbing a hill or descending into a valley. And in complex optimization problems that have seen a lot of iteration, most choices are usually bad.
You can, of course, iterate on empirical differences, and most people do, but the cycle time's long, the results are noisy, and a lot of people aren't very good at that sort of reflection in the first place.
But it's not that the choice is random -- it's that the consequences of choices are rather uncertain.
Well, first it's well-bounded: there is both an upper bound on how much (in health and longevity) you can gain by manipulating your diet, and a clear lower bound (poisons tend to be obvious). Second, there is hope in untangling -- eventually -- all the underlying biochemistry so that we don't have to treat the body as a mostly-black box.
Another thing is that there is a LOT of individual (or group) variation, something that most nutritional research tends to ignore, that is, treat it as unwanted noise.
A major problem is that it's legally/politically/morally hard to experiment on humans, even with full consent.