Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

If it's real science, you would expect advice to change as more data comes in, so perhaps you should find a better example.

View on HN

Can you share an example of real science where advice changed as more data come in?

The answers to this are so numerous and the logic so obvious that we as citizens may be to close to even see them.

Pretty much every bit of advice in the health sciences has been changing over multiple generations (lead and xrays are two easy examples from over 50 years ago)

But if you have witnessed that, wouldn't it be prudent to remain doubtful about any new advice coming from the field? After all, the probability of it being thrown out in the future seems to be almost 100%?

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is a process, not a library of knowledge. You do the best you can with the info you have right now. Every time science changes, it means it’s getting better.

Anything else is religion — wanting to have a single unchanging answer forever. That’s the appeal of religion, and in the short term it might make you feel better, but in the long term it cannot adapt and eventually is out of sync with reality.

Science always wins because it can change.

But you mentioned things that were flat out wrong or harmful. I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that scientism is science.

The problem is science almost always (except maybe in physics??) pretends it has arrived at the ultimate truth this time. It’s easy to detect too: just watch for the phrase “but now we know...”

It would help tremendously if new information was presented with some humility.

100% agreed. So much so that I was compelled to expand on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634484

Read some Feynman and I think it'll open your eyes. You could certainly engage with the fatalist nature of some of his writing, but it basically means we're always on an iterative journey of refining our position. The way I read it is that "science" is not a thing to believe in, it's merely a practice or process. You either believe the scrupulousness with the data we have today or you can guess about what will be next, but that doesn't really invalidate today's stance until it does.

Thoroughly confused? Welcome to science.

With physics perhaps it is refinement, but the example of the OP was diet, wasn't it? Changing from "fat is bad" to "fat is healthy" or whatever is not refining or iterating.

I missed where the example was diet, but even there:

Old science said “we observe that people who eat excess fat die younger, therefore we conclude that fat is bad”

Later, science said “Now that we understand more about the body, we now know that we need a certain amount of fat to live because among other things our brains are made of fat and we efficiently use fat as fuel. We have also found that there are different types of fat and that some people process each type differently. In addition, the previous conclusion was too broad. Those people who died younger also had inactive lifestyles and ate mainly processed food that’s full of sugar so we threw out most of that old data and started over with a better method. We have now observed that people who consume only healthy fats live longer than people who don’t. Therefore we conclude that a certain amount of healthy fat is good for you.”

Smoking tobacco would be the simplest example.

Anything related with astronomy, for example.

Pasteur, Galileo, Einstein, Wegener...

Ulcer provides a pretty startling example.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com