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Survival of the Wrongest

65 点作者 anupj超过 12 年前

7 条评论

JohnsonB超过 12 年前
I can't speak for the rest of the article, but this guy's take on low carb diets is a bit...odd:<p>&#62;Unfortunately, it’s an approach [Low carb diets] that leaves the vast majority of frontline obesity experts gritting their teeth, because while the strategy sometimes appears to hold up in studies, in the real world such dieters are rarely able to keep the weight off—to say nothing of the potential health risks of eating too much fat.<p>So he's saying that studies do support low carb diets having high efficacy rates (for weight loss), but "in the real world" this doesn't pan out. What is this unbiased, statistically significant source of data on "the real world" that he's relying on? He's ruled out studies, and it's obviously not anecdotes because that would be even worse. That basically just leaves intuition. He then goes on to cite the risks of a high protein diet (while linking it as high fat only) by linking to a WebMD article which appears to be written by an unnamed author who has poorly collated the research on the issue and left out major advances of our understanding of issues like cholesterol levels.
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shokwave超过 12 年前
It's all well and noble to say "health journalism is flawed, everything is breathlessly reported as a breakthrough", but when you put Tara Parker-Pope and Gary Taubes in the same category, you're committing more of the same mistakes. There's nothing noble at all in shooting down <i>all</i> of health journalism.<p>He goes on to say:<p>"Worse still, health journalists are taking advantage of the wrongness problem. Presented with a range of conflicting findings for almost any interesting question, reporters are free to pick those that back up their preferred thesis."<p>It appears that this author's preferred thesis is that when presented with conflicting evidence, one should throw one's hands up in despair and do whatever you want ("apply common sense liberally"), instead of some kind of analysis of the evidence to find which side of the conflict is more reliable.
tokenadult超过 12 年前
The previous submission of the canonical URL<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5019442" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5019442</a><p>received no discussion, but I think that's too bad, and I would love to see discussion of this interesting article begin here.
jisaacstone超过 12 年前
The problem with personal health news is that is is never news. A single study that contradicts conventional wisdom or purports a new finding is not meant to be digested by the general public.<p>Ideally such a study would be published in a medical journal, and other researchers would then perform studies to corroborate or disprove the original; After a sufficient amount of evidence is gather a systematic review would be published, and the results of that would be distributed to doctors and health advice reporters, who would present the information to the general public in a clear, unified and easy-to-understand manner.<p>In a perfect world.<p>The reporting of every study only leads the general public to believe that nothing is certain (because dissenting views are published) and not take any of the advice seriously. It is almost as bad as politics.
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rm999超过 12 年前
I think this is an important article for the HN crowd. Educated STEM people usually have a strong devotion to science, but science very often fails at revealing the truth (dangerously, in a misleading manner). The article points out the problem isn't malice or incompetence, it's bad expectations.<p>To me, a critical analysis of research is often more valuable than the research itself.
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breadbox超过 12 年前
Ben Goldacre's recent book "Bad Pharma" is all about how easy it is for pharmaceutical research to go astray (and/or be led astray). I would recommend it for anyone interested in the details of this thorny subject.
csense超过 12 年前
If a p-value of .05 means a study's results are significant, then 20% of studies will arrive at an incorrect conclusion through chance! If counterintuitive conclusions make interesting articles, but negative results are somewhat boring even to professional scientists, is it any real surprise that the end result is a steady stream of dubious advice?<p>This argument was shamelessly paraphrased from XKCD [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://xkcd.com/882/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/882/</a>