Big Fat Surprise — Beware Abuse of Science

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A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. 

The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. 

Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.

This quote is from a longish article describing how politics and bullying led nutrional science astray in assessing the health impact of saturated fats and sugar, calling the former the culprit, while ignoring the detrimental effects of sugar, the true culprit. 

See also my Models Modelling Themselves ...