> I’d only like to suggest that being “a joke in nutrition science circles” in the recent past is probably something of a compliment.
This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.
The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.
Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.
It’s a shame that our institutions have burned so much good will and credibility that they’ve created an environment for this to thrive.
All metrics I see show faith in these institutions going to zero. Most good science I see is making (and has been making for decades) a really strong case that this loss of faith is deserved.
Credentialism is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption.
The solution is better institutions, not less institutions.
Good institutions have mechanisms in place to correct themselves.
And most of the past failures of our institutions were discovered and corrected by ... the institutions (sometimes the very same institution or other institutions whose role was to counterweight the institution at fault)
Unfortunately the trap we all fell into is that we interpret this success at catching and fixing failures as proof that the institutions have failed and thus that they will never be trustworthy ever again.
We need to train ourselves that the trust we put in the institutions does not mean we trust everything that comes out of them, but we trust that the mistakes will be eventually corrected as they happen.
But that's not what's happening now. The society has equated the point-in-time failure of an institution with the failure of the entire process and also extended that feeling across the board towards areas of our society that haven't failed us much.
Nothing good will come out of that. For one, it will remove any incentive from future institutions to try to be objective and self-correct. If self-correction becomes a "capital sin" for institutions, they will be selected to favour absolute unquestionable truths which cannot possibly ever need a correction.
But also. it completely ignores the fact that most institutions are useful, even while they suffer from failures/corruption and that destroying them altogether is going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I haven't seen much self correction out of major institutions, but what I am really looking for is honesty.
I want them to share their uncertainty, nuance, and reasoning. Anything less I view as well intended lies.
Institutions as a concept are critical. Some institutions are net negative. Blindly following and support all institutions because some or even most are useful is a fallacy of its own.
I think the nutritional institution credibility is bankrupt at the moment. given the importance, I am willing to take the risk and put in the work to find my own way in the Forrest.
Furthermore, most institutions can only provide heuristic advice, which even when true, is t always true, or true for everyone. It should never be treated as dogma
Yeah you're right about nuance and the fact that it's hard to have a nuanced conversation nowadays.
For what is worth I'm precisely trying to bring nuance to the discussion about institutions.
Institutions do fail. That's a normal mode of their operation. They fail all the time. When institutions fail, they fail and some other institution (in the broadest case the institution of civil society as a whole) calls them out for the bullshit.
The question is: what to do next.
Should we dismantle that institution and other similar institutions, including the ones that helped provide the data that proved the failed institution wrong just because they are all institutions and guilty of the original sin of being an institution?
I find this approach to be a little bit too extreme.
Yes. many institutions are full of shit. Let's reward people who can reign them back in. But we need professionals. We cannot all be experts in everything. I know it can feel this way because we have an unprecedented source of information at our fingertips but realistically we cannot all just figure out things on our own.
I sure feel I'm super smart and I can figure out everything if I just had a weekend but luckily I grew just wise enough to know foolish and misleading that feeling is.
That's a fair question, I don't know what the mechanism for institutional reform is, or if the public has a role to play in it.
I agree that folks should not condemn the messenger. In this context, that seems to mean science as an institution or individual scientists. The lying institutions should be disregard untill they are shown to actually be reformed.
This is the fallacy that makes pseudoscience thrive right now: The idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Wannabe influencers position themselves as the anti-establishment position. People who are frustrated with institutions blindly fall in line behind them.
The fallacy doesn’t stand up to even the simplest critical thinking, yet it triggers something subconsciously that leads far too many people to see a contrarian statement and assume it must be true.
Meanwhile, these people are grifting away, selling books and pitching Athletic Greens (or the latest sponsor of the day). This person is no exception.