= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
To me it feels like this whole series is simply failing to find a smoking gun of Taubes saying something false, or Taubes implying that the mainstream view is X when it is actually Y, because a bunch of individual papers saying Y does not mean that the mainstream view is not X. On a recent visit to an endocrinologist she still earnestly advised me that I ought to reduce fat in my diet because fat has 9 calories per gram. Recently glancing at a state-government handbook for pregnant women it contained the original food pyramid with half your calories supposed to be for grains (along with a recommendation to get folic acid which didn't distinguish folic acid from folate, no mention of iodine supplementation, and no mention of choline supplementation). This is what Taubes is criticizing and the fact that many experimentalists have found that this is terrible and published papers accordingly is part of his criticism, not a refutation of it; he is, precisely, accusing mainstream dietary science of ignoring its own better knowledge, and continuing to have endocrinologists and government pamphlets earnestly advising people that eating fat makes you fat.
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar.
Except he doesn't even acknowledge what they did say about sugar, and portrays their recommendations as a mirror image of the Atkins diet.
You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up.
No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers.
Agreed. So why are you defending him?
...especially in the short-form article context that you start out quoting from (why, by the way is that your jumping off point? It seems totally ill-suited as a best-version of his argument).
Because in "The Correct Contrarian Cluster," Eliezer claims "Dietary scientists ignoring their own experimental evidence have killed millions and condemned hundreds of millions more to obesity with high-fructose corn syrup", and cites Taubes' 2002 article as his source.
Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I was worried about embarrassing Eliezer, but that was probably a mistake, insofar as it may have left people wondering why I was wasting my time on such an awful article. But it seemed worth addressing, insofar Eliezer apparently thought it made a good argument that crazed dietary scientists had killed millions.
Wait, the American Heart Association can get away with assuming that level of sophistication in their (much more general) audience...
Yeah, the AHA probably should have been clearer. But I'm not sure that's exactly "sophistication" they were assuming. It's stuff I've known literally since grade school. And I'm conscious of how easy it is for well-informed people to underestimate how ignorant the average person is, and I grew up with a dad for a dentist and a biochemist for a mother, and who knows, maybe my grade school did an unusually good job of nutrition education, I don't know... but on the other hand, knowing sweets aren't health food isn't rocket science. It's a message you've heard if you've seen the Food Pyramid at some point in your life.
Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.
No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
I don't see outright misrepresentations. I see a focus on what Taubes thinks they did wrong.
Agreed. So why are you defending him?
Because everyone fails Less Wrong's standards for argument and discussion. Everyone here could spend 24 hours a day pointing out dark epistemology in the writings of public intellectuals and we would always have more work to do. If you're going to target a particular person it doesn't seem worthwhile unless the central content of the persons's work is wrong or dishonest-- especially with the context of a broader debate. Call it the Rationalist's Fallacy, in a world where everyone selectively emphasizes some facts to support their position someone selectively emphasizing facts that support their position provides little to no evidence about whether they are right or wrong, whether they are honest or dishonest or whether their work is net beneficial for the world.
Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I was worried about embarrassing Eliezer, but that was probably a mistake, insofar as it may have left people wondering why I was wasting my time on such an awful article. But it seemed worth addressing, insofar Eliezer apparently thought it made a good argument that crazed dietary scientists had killed millions.
Okay, well that makes some sense. But I sort of suspect Eliezer thought Taubes work in general made a good case that dietary scientists had killed millions and that was just the most convenient article he had when looking for cites.
knowing sweets aren't health food isn't rocket science.
Candy, sure. But there are tons of people who think yogurt with fruit(and corn syrup) on the bottom is health food. And juice. And Gatorade. I'll bet a lot of people have purchased a sugar filled cereal for their children after looking at the bottom of that food pyramid.
But what I don't get is why this confidence in the readers of the AHA pamphlet doesn't yield more charity when interpreting Taubes.
Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.
Nowhere does he say that. What he says is:
and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy.
If we're assuming the reader has enough knowledge to understand that the government's recommendations have never been very high on sweets it's pretty clear that what Taubes is saying is that people end up drinking a lot of soft drinks (but this certainly applies even more to fruit juices and sports drinks) because they have been told that the primary thing they should do to avoid gaining weight is to avoid fat at all costs. Which, if not obviously true is certainly a very plausible hypothesis.
And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
I think this is where you disagree with the main post (and with me). I know several people who have read Taubes that have no idea what the main stream nutrition advice is (they are steeped in paleo blogs that paint a very dismissive straw man of mainstream nutrition). Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books' pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it's about the low-fat prescription.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn't a "sugar makes you fat" message.
Then what was bad about it?
Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
So that's an interesting data point. If this is a common view among paleo/low-carb people than I would certainly agree that Taubes is to blame.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
I didn't get this impression about his position on sugar from his books. Never thought he departed drastically from the mainstream in terms of advice about sugar consumption. I certainly get this impression from his view on carbohydrates more generally and anti-fat and anti-saturated fat messages( which is what the books are actually about!). If Chris or someone posts something indicating that he is misrepresenting mainstream nutrition science there I'll change my min.
Then what was bad about it?
It's hard to reconstruct these things, but Nornagest's comment is basically what I remember. I definitely remember thinking Popsicles were healthier than ice cream because they didn't contain fat.
I think the point is that the mainstream nutrition is just as against refined sugar as it is fats (they are in the same area in the pyramid). Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite. Taubes and mainstream nutrition largely AGREE, but Taubes paints himself as a contrarian. To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
As an anecdote, when I was school aged in the 80s, my public school's nurse successfully got sugar-added drinks (pop,etc) removed from the school, although the cafeteria continued to serve some very fat-heavy entrees (cheap, processed burgers and what not). I was actually saddened to learn a few years after I finished, under pressure from their vendors, the school put the vending machines and soda fountain back in the cafeteria.
All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the "fat" message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison). Walking through the grocery store, I can find as many "low-sugar" and "sugar- free" items as I can find "low-fat" and "fat-free."
Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite.
I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books' pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it's about the low-fat prescription.
All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the "fat" message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison).
I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn't a "sugar makes you fat" message.
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar. You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up. Yes, I suppose the FDA could have encouraged people to consume more high fructose corn syrup and good on the government for not doing that. Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers. He's also constrained by popular science book length limit.
I'm sure the direct content of a nutritional recommendation is getting conflated with the practical effects it has on what people eat, especially in the short-form article context that you start out quoting from (why, by the way is that your jumping off point? It seems totally ill-suited as a best-version of his argument).
The part that Taubes ridicules about low-fat cookies and so on comes from a section on snacks that doesn't come with a recommended number of daily servings. I suppose if you read the AHA pamphlet knowing nothing else about nutrition, you could take that as a sign that the listed snacks are wonderfully healthy and you should eat as much of them as you like. But anyone familiar with the standard nutrition advice of the time would understand that the intended meaning is "if you snack, choose the low-fat options"—not that you should necessarily be snacking much at all. That may or may not have been good advice, but it's not nearly so absurd as Taubes makes it out to be.
Wait, the American Heart Association can get away with assuming that level of sophistication in their (much more general) audience but Taubes isn't allowed to assume we know the government wasn't literally recommending people drink soda and infer that he is complaining about relative levels of emphasis-- the focus on fat over sugar?
I also worry that people who haven't read Taubes will think you're talking about a central argument of his. This entire sugar digression is basically tangential to the bulk of his critque.
Marsh et al. "Serotonin Transporter Genotype (5-HTTLPR) Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgments"
The whole paper is here. In short, they found a genotype that predicts people's response to the original trolley problem:
A trolley (i.e. in British English a tram) is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?
Participants with one kind of serotonin transmitter (LL-homozygotes) judged flipping the switch to be better than a morally neutral action. Participants with the other kind (S-carriers) judged flipping the switch to be no better than a morally neutral action. The groups responded equally to the "fat man scenario" both rejecting the 'push' option.
Some quotes:
We hypothesized that 5-HTTLPR genotype would interact with intentionality in respondents who generated moral judgments. Whereas we predicted that all participants would eschew intentionally harming an innocent for utilitarian gains, we predicted that participants' judgments of foreseen but unintentional harm would diverge as a function of genotype. Specifically, we predicted that LL homozygotes would adhere to the principle of double effect and preferentially select the utilitarian option to save more lives despite unintentional harm to an innocent victim, whereas S-allele carriers would be less likely to endorse even unintentional harm. Results of behavioral testing confirmed this hypothesis.
Participants in this study judged the acceptability of actions that would unintentionally or intentionally harm an innocent victim in order to save others' lives. An analysis of variance revealed a genotype × scenario interaction, F(2, 63) = 4.52, p = .02. Results showed that, relative to long allele homozygotes (LL), carriers of the short (S) allele showed particular reluctance to endorse utilitarian actions resulting in foreseen harm to an innocent individual. LL genotype participants rated perpetrating unintentional harm as more acceptable (M = 4.98, SEM = 0.20) than did SL genotype participants (M = 4.65, SEM = 0.20) or SS genotype participants (M = 4.29, SEM = 0.30).
...
The results indicate that inherited variants in a genetic polymorphism that influences serotonin neurotransmission influence utilitarian moral judgments as well. This finding is interpreted in light of evidence that the S allele is associated with elevated emotional responsiveness.
A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics
Below is a sketch of a moral anti-realist position based on the map-territory distinction, Hume and studies of psychopaths. Hopefully it is productive.
The Map is Not the Territory Reviewed
Consider the founding metaphor of Less Wrong: the map-territory distinction. Beliefs are to reality as maps are to territory. As the wiki says:
Since our predictions don't always come true, we need different words to describe the thingy that generates our predictions and the thingy that generates our experimental results. The first thingy is called "belief", the second thingy "reality".
Of course the map is not the territory.
Here is Albert Einstein making much the same analogy:
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.
The above notions about beliefs involve pictorial analogs, but we can also imagine other ways the same information could be contained. If the ideal map is turned into a series of sentences we can define a 'fact' as any sentence in the ideal map (IM). The moral realist position can then be stated as follows:
Moral Realism: ∃x(x ⊂ IM) & (x = M)
In English: there is some set of sentences x such that all the sentences are part of the ideal map and x provides a complete account of morality.
Moral anti-realism simply negates the above. ¬(∃x(x ⊂ IM) & (x = M)).
Meta: A 5 karma requirement to post in discussion
Admins have been doing a decent, timely job taking down the spam that comes up in the Discussion section. But it is an eyesore for any period of time and there seems to be more and more of it. And there is an easy solution: a small karma requirement for discussion section posts. I think 5 would about right. A reasonable, literate person can get 5 karma pretty easily. "Hi, I'm new" usually does it. That plus a half-way insightful comment about something almost definitely will. This would screen out the spammers. As for the occasional genuine user that posts in discussion before commenting at all, I don't know how many there have been but my sense is that delaying them from posting until they can get five upvotes is almost certainly a good thing.
Thoughts? Or is changing this actually a difficult task that requires rewriting the site's code and that's why it hasn't been done already?
Dutch Books and Decision Theory: An Introduction to a Long Conversation
For a community that endorses Bayesian epistemology we have had surprisingly few discussions about the most famous Bayesian contribution to epistemology: the Dutch Book arguments. In this post I present the arguments, but it is far from clear yet what the right way to interpret them is or even if they prove what they set out to. The Dutch Book arguments attempt to justify the Bayesian approach to science and belief; I will also suggest that any successful Dutch Book defense of Bayesianism cannot be disentangled from decision theory. But mostly this post is to introduce people to the argument and to get people thinking about a solution. The literature is scant enough that it is plausible people here could actually make genuine progress, especially since the problem is related to decision theory.1
Bayesianism fits together. Like a well-tailored jacket it feels comfortable and looks good. It's an appealing, functional aesthetic for those with cultivated epistemic taste. But sleekness is not a rigourous justification and so we should ask: why must the rational agent adopt the axioms of probability as conditions for her degrees of belief? Further, why should agents accept the principle conditionalization as a rule of inference? These are the questions the Dutch Book arguments try to answer.
The arguments begin with an assumption about the connection between degrees of belief and willingness to wager. An agent with degree of belief b in hypothesis h is assumed to be willing to buy wager up to and including $b in a unit wager on h and sell a unit wager on h down to and including $b. For example, if my degree of belief that I can drink ten eggnogs without passing out is .3 I am willing to bet $0.30 on the proposition that I can drink the nog without passing out when the stakes of the bet are $1. Call this the Will-to-wager Assumption. As we will see it is problematic.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
You quotes from mainstream sources certainly indicate that the nutrition science community is familiar with the diverse factors that can lead to obesity-- but that's not surprising and wouldn't be surprising to Taubes. The issue has never been that the mainstream refuses to recognize that heredity, medications, hormones and altered metabolism can contribute to individuals being overweight. The issue is that these facts contribute almost nothing to the medical and nutrition authorities response to individuals trying to lose weight or to the world's growing obesity problem more generally.
You've found plenty of quotes from Taubes in which he doesn't really make that distinction. We can agree he is guilty of using hyperbolic language to make his point and avoids equivocating to make his writing sound better. If he wants to avoid being read uncharitably by you in the future he should stop that.
After talking about how mainstream sources do take things other than calories in -- calories out into consideration, and linking to someone (Guyenet) who seems to have actually taken these other things seriously in his consideration of the causes of obesity; you make Taubes' point for him by concluding that we should actually be talking about akrasia.
I've lowered my pre-series credence for the position that "Taubes is right about how low-carb diets work" due to the Guyenet piece. My credence for "Low-carb diets are more effective for losing weight than calorie counting" remains high. As does "Sugar and other easily-digestible, low-fiber carbohydrates -- not over-eating, portion-size or lack of exercise -- are the primary causes of the 'obesity epidemic' in the Western world."