Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I'm not mad at you in particular, this approach makes me mad. "How do you go about qualifying and reviewing", the previous 200,000 years of (anatomically modern) human development doesn't mean anything?

Why do we need a 'scientific study' for everything? This is particularly evident in 'nutritional science' too, when I see an article 'such-and-such vegetable is good for you' I just laugh. Of course it is, we've been eating plants (and animals) for hundreds of thousands of years. What else?

How should we humans raise our young? It'd be pretty difficult to do worse than the current standard.

I remember watching Koyaanisqatsi a couple of decades ago and just thinking "Yep, pretty much." In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "unbalanced life"

One of our issues in these times is that we are all so sceptical we demand 'evidence' for everything, then go on to doubt the methodology and debate how to interpret the results, and then fail to act.

We've reduced the family unit to 1 -we literally live alone- and then wonder why children, adolescents, and adults aren't 'well adjusted'. Are families are (often) so sick it's little wonder we move away from them. Not to mention the economic incentives: we can sell more lawn mowers if everyone has to own one. It's good for 'the economy', as though The Economy is some entity separate from ourselves.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti

Mustn't've had my medication today.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi

We've been praying to gods for a long time too, but it looks pretty likely that it just doesn't work.

This stuff needs scientific study because simply being ancient doesn't mean something is any good. Sometimes these things are great, sometimes they're useless, sometimes they're harmful. Science is how you figure out which is which.

Simply being ancient won't make anything good, no, but if it's lasted a long time and was really widespread, there's very likely a good reason for it due to how evolution works.

A meme's widespread existence only tells that the meme itself is good at survival and propagation - not that it is in any way useful (or that it isn't (or is) harmful).

What does "useful" mean? Survival and propagation are strong indicators.

GP means useful to the 'host' of the meme, that is, to you or me, while the survival and propagation refer to the meme itself. For example, a particular catchy tune might be very successful (very popular i.e. high survival and propagation) but it isn't necessarily useful (to me).

For more extreme examples, consider Nazism or malaria.

Neither of those are widespread in any population. Quite the opposite, they flare up and then vanish.

Fair enough with Nazism. How about war instead? Malaria seems to persist quite well, and doesn't vanish.

When I say "widespread" I'm thinking of being relatively constant for centuries. The sad thing is that war probably is adaptive on some horrific level. I'd trouble naming a country that hasn't survived a war in its past and which has been around for at least a couple centuries.

War is one of those things that's absolutely a survival advantage if everyone else does it but which is nothing but destructive compared to a hypothetical world where nobody does it. Thus we all get pushed into it, even though it's a massive net negative.

Which is incidentally like a lot of other destructive ideas and traditions.

It's more of a prisoner's dilemma. It's great as long as nobody else starts one.

It would be beneficial to quantify exactly what about a certain vegetable is good, and to compare it to others. That way, you could obtain the most nutritional value within certain constraints.

Perhaps a certain vegetable is known to provide the most nutrients for the longest storage time. This could benefit people in third-world countries, whose food storage is at a premium.

I get it, you're disillusioned with people who demand scientific evidence uber alles. But the approach has its benefits. And what you may think is obvious because it was true in the past may be proven wrong.

What I don't understand is that you seem to be asking for people to think less critically. We should end science and just return to the olden times? Some of your argument makes a lot of sense to me (sharing lawnmowers with our neighbors rather than owning them entirely). But you also ask people to act without knowledge.

Your argument doesn't offer much in the way of solutions besides immediately acting without data.

> Why do we need a 'scientific study' for everything?

There's value in knowing that we do something because it's actually a good thing to do, and not just a quirk some ancient monarch had that was adopted by the peasantry.

There's also value in knowing why something is good to do. Maybe we can find more ways to do it.

I agree with all the respondents. Yes, we need science. Probably what we especially need is some rigorous studies in this topic in particular, but how would we do that? Where's the 'control group'? Double-blind, randomised, placebo controlled, longitudinal study? All we have instead is the 'Social Sciences', which have trouble even predicting the past.

> Why do we need a 'scientific study' for everything?

In the field of psychology, counterintuitive things happen all the time. And there's plenty of things our forebears did that were not optimal - one easy example is women being second-class citizens pretty much everywhere people settled down.

> In the field of psychology, counterintuitive things happen all the time.

But can only be replicated a few times.

> In the field of psychology, counterintuitive things happen all the time.

But can only be replicated a few times.

That said, there is (in general) much too little evidence-based policy around, we don't need less of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com