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Comment by mtberatwork | Hacker News Reader

> Deferring to experts is a poor substitute for thinking for yourself.

Not deferring to experts when you posses surface level knowledge (or less) of a subject is a sure-fire way to shoot yourself in the foot.

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He is just being a cynic thinking he is a intellectual skeptic.

Cynic : Cynics are distrustful of any advice or information that they do not agree with themselves. Cynics do not accept any claim that challenges their belief system.

"Being skeptical, not cynical, helps us in forming beliefs that are in agreement with evidence."

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/08/im-a-skepti...

That's quite a conclusion, given so little data. Priors may vary I guess.

No their was plenty of data. I run into cynics all the time that just doubts everything "Experts" says and their arguments are not about the actual data or implementation of the data.

The biggest I've run into are people who believe in homeopathy. Give them all the evidence that it doesn't work and they'll disregard it in favor of their anecdotal evidence combined with confirmation bias.

I think it's a really common form of irrationality (or cognitive bias?). Antivaxers, 9/11 truthers, moon landing skeptics, Holocaust skeptics, etc. are the same way. I think part of the appeal is that it's more comforting for them to believe in BS than live with the existential angst of the uncertainty and the unknowability of so much of life/reality/other people, but for whatever reason they can't see that motivation within themselves.

My point is that they are NO skeptics but cynics

In this particular case, the experts have not only been wrong, but been deadly wrong for the last thirty years. Nutrition has been revealed to be woo-woo pseudoscience after mountains of recent research has debunked the lipid hypothesis for heart disease.

Reinhart has NO obligation to heed the "wisdom" of people who have been killing us with sugar for decades now. We should have nothing but contempt for these charlatans.

Great, so you've discounted one tradition of food advice, although it is far from clear whom, exactly, you're discounting - you start talking about what sounds like dietitians, but end talking about what sounds like processed food manufacturers. But never mind.

Now you have a search problem. Which dilettante do you want to listen to? A techie making a protein shake that makes people sick is far from your only option. As best I can tell, most folks tend to choose diet fads based on a messy set of priors and an aesthetic judgement about the surrounding marketing.

It makes market sense to me that something like Soylent would find a niche; there is a segment that finds eating a hassle, and so an anti-food with hints of Jetsons-food-capsule, from-the-future marketing has a place alongside all the other goofy food fads.

I just don't see any reason to rank Soylent any higher than macrobiotic hyperlocal kale wonder-juice, either. (I do rank both higher than the colloidal silver thing; as far as I know, neither turns you blue.)

Nutrition experts aren't the ones responsible for the prevalence of sugar and starches in our diet, though:

http://www.whale.to/a/light.html

No, you should definitely listen to what experts have to say. You should then proceed to evaluate it critically. Be mindful of what methodology they use. What assumptions they bake into what they're saying. Ways their model doesn't fit reality. And so on, and so forth. You should seldom defer to them.

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