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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zax who wrote (908850)	12/16/2015 6:13:32 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573001

Taking aim at her Republican opponents in the election and pledging to build on the success of the Paris accord, she said: “We cannot afford to be slowed by the climate skeptics or deterred by the defeatists who doubt America’s ability to meet this challenge. That’s why as president, I will make combating climate change a top priority from day one.” Clinton has also rolled out programs for building on the Dodd-Frank reforms, for fixing Obamacare — including the elimination of the unpopular “Cadillac tax” on premium health-care plans — as well as advancing new policies for immigration reform and taking a tougher line on the geopolitical miasma in the Middle East and Russia. Combining Obama’s successes with credible alternatives to his failures could indeed be a formidable platform for a presidential candidate. Paving the way for the first woman to be elected president — not to mention the first former First Lady — would then also become a part of Obama’s legacy.

To: zax who wrote (908850)

12/16/2015 9:36:45 AM

From: jlallen

Respond to of 1573001

How's That Scientific Consensus Working Out For You?
Manhattan Contrarian by Francis Menton

If you put some time into looking at various situations where a scientific "consensus" has developed, you will be stunned at how often the consensus has later proved to have been dead wrong. The phenomenon is particularly prevalent in fields involving complex and poorly understood systems. The human body is one such system. The climate is another.

Back in my law school days, one of my friends developed a case of severe and debilitating stomach ulcers. In those days (early 1970s) the "scientific consensus" was that ulcers were caused by some combination of stress and harsh and spicy foods. Of course my friend went to doctors, and of course their diagnosis was that stress was mainly to blame. Hey, what could be more stressful than the first year at law school? (This was actually the year that the book The Paper Chase came out.) Next thing you know the poor guy was told that he needed to take a year off from school and go on a diet of bland mush. After a hiatus he came back, but somehow the ulcers had not really improved.

Turned out that the whole idea of stress as a cause of ulcers was plain wrong. Experiments in the mid-80s by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren established the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as the principal cause. In 2005 Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Now most ulcers can be cured by a couple of weeks of antibiotics. But before their hypothesis was established, Marshall and Warren underwent a good deal of scorn and ridicule for bucking the "consensus." Here is a summary from Bahar Gholipur of Live Science, citing Dr. Arun Swaminath of Lenox Hill Hospital:

The discovery of H. pylori's role in ulcers led to the Nobel Prize in 2005 for Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who were ridiculed when they suggested the idea, Swaminath said. It is a myth that peptic ulcers are caused by stress and spicy food.

Meanwhile, as the consensus persisted, people like my law school friend had to suffer for no reason.

Or how about the consensus that the way to reduce the risk of heart disease is the low fat diet. The geniuses in our government, based on consensus science, started recommending to reduce fat in the diet about 40 years ago. Today the campaign against dietary fat remains literally everywhere, and you can't go to the grocery store without getting bombarded with sales pitches for low fat products. The following line continued to appear as recently as the 2010 guidelines that were not superseded until early this year:

A strong body of evidence indicates that higher intake of most dietary saturated fatty acids is associated with higher levels of blood total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Higher total and LDL cholesterol levels are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

And what "evidence" was that exactly? I would say the whole thing was based on myth from the get-go, but it gets worse. This was/is one of those myths that was just so intuitively obvious and had such a strong consensus backing it that it became literally impossible to destroy. Study after study completely contradicted the hypothesis that dietary fat increased the risk of heart disease, but the consensus went on undisturbed for decades. To take just one of the largest and most definitive studies among many, in the 90s the government commissioned a gigantic randomized study of 50,000 women called the Women's Health Initiative Diet Modification Trial. After a full eight years of following the women, in 2006 the Harvard School of Public Health came out with a report summarizing the results:

The results . . . showed no benefits for a low-fat diet. Women assigned to this eating strategy did not appear to gain protection against breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or cardiovascular disease. And after eight years, their weights were generally the same as those of women following their usual diets.

But even that devastating conclusion couldn't kill off this one. Four years after that report -- and plenty of others with similar results -- the government reissued its dietary guidelines without change. And those guidelines remained in effect right up until this year. Finally in February of this year the government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee began the slow backdown from the bogus recommendations it has been disseminating for decades. Here is the February 2015 Report, couched in endless bureaucratese. Or try a summary from the Washington Post wonkblog on February 10:

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption. The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.

And by the way, it's not just that the government's guidelines were dead wrong for 40 years. Many assert that the guidelines in addition were actively harmful to the health of the American people, basically because reducing fat in the diet inevitably leads to increase in consumption of more-harmful carbohydrates. Here is one such assertion (by a heart surgeon named Dwight Lundell). (For myself, I continue to follow the guidance of eating what tastes good.)

The most remarkable thing about the high-fat-diet/heart-disease hypothesis is that the accumulation of decades worth of devastating contrary evidence has still not killed it off completely. Even the latest report from the Advisory Committee is only a partial backdown from the recommendation to reduce fat. Hey, it's consensus! Everybody knows it's true! Same thing, of course, is going on in climate science. Eighteen plus years of contrary evidence? So? The leader of every single country in the world knows that consensus trumps the evidence!