Ask HN: What are examples of common beliefs conclusively invalidated by data?
The belief in the “hot hand” in sports is not an example of this. It seems to be “proven” or “disproven” every couple of years.
Bio/organic food is healthier than the regular food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety
This is misleading from the link you sent.
> There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult
It would be more correct to say "healthier than non-organic food". I read your message at first thinking you meant organics were unhealthy :)
What are you trying to get at with this statement?
> The emails further demonstrated that since 2005 Monsanto has attempted to destroy my team’s work and reputation, in particular by recruiting third-party, supposedly independent experts at the highest levels to voice ghost-written and biased arguments (Henry Miller or Wallace Hayes, for instance [10,11,12]), who did not, however, publicly disclose their links with Monsanto
I'm not saying that the author is wrong, or that their criticisms of the other study are meritless (I have 0 experience in this field), especially with the widespread ethics concerns they point out.
But this particular paper doesn't draw any conclusions.
I don't buy organic food because I think it's healthier either btw. I do it because of the environmental impacts - same reason I buy local as much as possible via CSAs for my meat and veggies - whether they are certified organic or not (you can usually find a local farm that has practices just as good or better than certified organic anyways). It's super ironic to me that people think they're being environmentally friendly or saving the earth with GMO non-organic food just because it isn't meat. For all the conspiracies around Bill Gates I think his ideas of using tech to save the environment are scarier because it's actually ignoring science.
It's very easy to look at both at these data points and think "oh, so it's okay to just go and support GMO and ignore organic farmers". In reality though, the criticism against GMO is how its wide-scale adoption destroys genetic diversity, and how this lack of diversity is a huge potential source of systemic risks.
That's not a belief, this is a stated preference, and you would be fully entitled to ignore it as "invalid criticism" due to the confusion between facts and opinions.
The belief that you are actually asking me to "back up with links" is that GMO reduces genetic diversity. Do you really need a link for that?
That is (a) a bit hyperbolic, (b) more applicable to large-scale, "industrial" farming and (c) not exactly desirable, right?
> Competing GMO banana products would introduce more diversity than exists today.
A good example of "it's the dosage that makes the difference between the poison and the medicine".
I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it's certainly not true that the existence of GMO crops will by definition significantly decrease overall biodiversity.
Even then, if every banana in the world was genetically identical what harmful effect would this have? I can probably speculate, but I'm genuinely curious what the science says.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707887/
Grass-legume mixtures sustain strong yield advantage over monocultures under cool maritime growing conditions over a period of 5 years
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29790908/
Biodiversity loss in Latin American coffee landscapes: review of the evidence on ants, birds, and trees (2008)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18759777/
Temporal changes in genetic diversity and forage yield of perennial ryegrass in monoculture and in combination with red clover in swards (2018)
That's only one possible outcome, and I think it's not a very likely one long term. Genetic modification can create large numbers of variants, so could potentially increase genetic diversity significantly.
I think more of a criticism is the unknown consequences of modified genetic material escaping into other species by horizontal gene transfer.
The problem is not with genetically modification, the problem is with the scale that is done.
And if we want to talk scale, do you see corn that looks like wheat being planted and harvested? At all? Of course not - it wouldn't provide enough yield to be useful.
Bananas is also an example of this process of “GMO-by-hand” stopping due to economic reasons, leading to monocultures susceptible to disease, twice as I understand it.
Early corn: https://tdaynard.com/2020/01/12/how-corn-began/
The evidence that the Moderna vaccine lowers the risk of death due to COVID is conclusive in the sense that a controlled, double blind study was performed and we have determined with some degree of certainty (>99.9%) that the vaccine is effective. But it's relatively easy to design an experiment.
How would you even go about designing an experiment for organic food. Giving a vaccine is binary... it was given on two occasions or it wasn't. With organic food, if there are benefits to it, they are most likely over a much longer term. So you'd need to police a participant's eating habits for years or maybe even decades to test your hypothesis. It's not a practical experiment to perform. At best we can say "there's no scientific evidence that organic food is better for you than non-organic", but that's not the same as saying "we have concluded with 99.9% certainty that organic food is no better for you than non-organic food".
Certain things just can't be tested effectively, especially things as complicated as diet. This is why dietary recommendations change so frequently. Still, not everything requires conclusive science. There's never been a controlled experiment showing that parachutes save skydivers' lives. But sometimes common sense trumps the need for scientific inquiry.
EDIT: Please don't read this as anti-science. On the contrary, science is great for answering certain questions, but has limitations for other questions.
On the basis of the article that you linked to, I think it would be more accurate to say that "currently available GMO food is not thought to be harmful to humans."
There is nothing inherent in genetic modification that prevents if from being used to create food that is harmful when consumed by people (or animals) - whether due to toxicity or negative dietary effects. There probably isn't much incentive to do the former (except maybe as a weapon of war or terrorism), but engineering unhealthy but addictive foods isn't hard to imagine.
Similarly, theres nothing in the technology that prevents it from being used to develop plants or animals that cause harm to their environment - for example by runaway reproduction, excessive use of resources like water, affecting species equilibria, etc.
I personally wouldn't be worried about eating a GMO foodstuff, but I'm extremely unhappy about the environmental impact of ideas like terminator seeds or engineered pesticide resistance that leads to over-use of pesticides, and I wouldn't call them "safe".
I would actually say instead that "there is no reason to think that genetic modification itself introduces any additional danger to the food". Of course you can create dangerous food using GMO. You can also just poison it, too.
This should be obviously untrue.
What if "conventional food" is bad and has been bred for things like appearance and shelf-stability over nutrition?
> A commonly-held lay public perception holds that the world is in terrible shape; for some, 2016 was the "worst year ever" and the year that liberalism died. In contrast, Pinker argues that life has been getting better for most people. He sets out 15 different measures of human wellbeing to support this argument, with the most obvious being the uncontroversial fact that, statistically, people live longer and healthier lives on average than ever before.
> It argues that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have brought progress; shows our progress with data that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness have tended to rise worldwide; and explains the cognitive science of why this progress should be appreciated.
We might make judgments to this end that misalign with our values or misunderstand the data, but that doesn't mean a judgment like "the world is getting worse" will ever be wrong. It will always true in some respects and not true in other respects.
When someone says the "world is worse", I automatically know they mean a value judgment "for them" or "for humans" or "for animals" and not some scientific, objective measure on the "Planet Earth Goodness Scale".
A valid criticism in this case is that they are clearly valuing humans above other species because the world is objectively worse for the Rusty-patched bumble bee, to pick an example, which is critically endangered.
Many, maybe even the majority, of people would agree with him because, well, we're humans.
So, in this threads context, once people have the "facts", they ALSO agree that the world is better, not worse.
I guess the point is; "this is value based" is a truism.
>Child mortality, childbirth death decrease >Child labor. >Life expectency >Literacy increase >Smoking decrease
For others, there's possibly quite a large room for cherry-picking data. I'm very happy if the following can be proved to be negligible ( or wrong ):
>Extreme poverty falling I'm not sure how the math ($1) can already be an adjusted for inflation / price variances. Probably should be using the income / wealth equality instead.
>People in developed countries have more leisure time But not in developing countries. Following the links, I find our working levels stay pretty much the same above the 2000h line. Also I'm interested in how much we compare to pre-industrial level.
>Smoking is down, but not so much in developing countries >Homicide rates have fallen dramatically, but only counting US and EU >The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US No mention of developing countries. World-wide the homicide rates looks to be about the same-ish ?.
>People have been getting taller for centuries There are more to nutrition than height, and world-wide looks like it has been same-ish since 1970.
>More people in the world live in a democracy now 50/50 on this one, mainly cause I'm not sure if the democracy index is measured objectively, or they just extend to whatever countries on good terms with the US.
>Tech & Moore's law I'm skeptic of more tech leads == better life, particularly when more people reported more internet time ~= decreased mental health.
In the United States, however, things have been going somewhat backwards since the mid 70's. The millennial generation is poorer than their parents were at the same age. Civil rights are beginning to get rolled back. The political situation is fraught.
There are also, as others have pointed out, a number of red flashing danger signs coming from the environment. The earth is limited, and we're treating it as if it's infinite.
So, from my point of view, here, the "world is getting worse" belief has some justification.
That's a new one for me, but I'm from Europe. I spent my childhood on rivers and lakes, rapidly alternating between food and swimming (and other things). No cramps due to food (scarcely any at all to be honest). I've had a lot more cramps in swimming pools than in natural water, now that I think about it.
> "You should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day"
I could believe that. I used to drink ~4 glasses a day, but it made me feel like a lizard (without really realizing the cause at the time). Now I drink more than 8 and feel much better.
I'll add one too since its on topic with reply;
Caffeine drinks like coffee will dehydrate you. Its a diuretic but you consume more water through it then you release. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h....
Wikipedia's only citation for this being false is a commercially published book[0], but there are various reports of experimental testing, e.g.:
https://www.seriouseats.com/perfect-prime-rib-beef-recipe
https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5699-searing-steak
[0] McGee, Harold (1990), The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore, page 13, "The Searing Truth"
Can it be proven for every single person or living entity? Can it be proven for every location? Can it be proven for every time, every season, every year. You can show the minuscule odds that someone will win the lottery yet people do win lotteries. What can you prove?
My personal anecdote is that hard times made easier times more fulfilling, and early hardship in my life has made later hardship much easier to deal with, in comparison to my peers.
But there is also a limit to that of course. Not sure how I'd handle losing a child for example, or if I'd ever be able to overcome something like that.
The phrase is technically incorrect, but the spirit of it absolutely is.
https://www.painscience.com/articles/cramps-spasms-twitches-...
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/happiness-satisfaction-...
The fact that the new equilibrium doesn't shut out all other desires in favor of a single focus shouldn't be surprising at all.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=hot+hand&submit=Se... [2] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/07/09/hey-guess-...
Also that of people only using 10% of their brain, since it's more accurate that people use different parts of their brains at different times. No, using 100% wouldn't give you psychic powers or make you superhuman or whatever else some works of fiction and new age mystics might posit.
Well with the advance of video gaming and high refresh rate displays that went out of the window quickly. Nowadays you even have 120hz displays on smartphones so easy to show someone the plain difference between 30fps and 120fps.
At home I have a 240hz monitor and even the difference between 144fps and 240fps is noticeable albeit not that big difference as between 30fps and higher ones.
I gamed with a CRT that did 640x480 @ 300hz back in the 90s.
- it brings negative performance when the diversity is age related
- it brings negative performance outside of tech/knowledge intensive jobs when it’s gender/ethnicity related
- Only educational diversity seems to bring positive results
Beliefs not conclusively supported by data may be wrong. Some such beliefs turn out to be essential to human functioning, like "My life is not just an extended dream or hallucination," "I have the ability to choose what I do," and "It is wrong to murder other people for their possessions."
I'd say the former is more interesting than the latter.
My experience has been slightly different, which is that almost no one is willing to accept that they could be wrong about certain classes of questions.
This has similar effects to no one caring what is actually true, but it is not quite the same thing.
I completely agree that that is one of the most harmful manifestations though.
To me, not caring what is true is exactly that - not caring. Your actions might be rooted in truth or not, but you don't care. You get your dopamine hits and who gives a shit how they came to happen?
Being certain that you're right is quite different. There, you care very intensely about what's true, but you're so confident in your knowledge of what's true that you can't even conceive of being wrong.
Both of them lead to pretty terrible behaviors, but the underlying reasons for those behaviors are quite different, IMO.
It's interesting however to consider _what exactly_ people believe counts as "omnipotent being" when they say they believe in the existence of one (e.g. religious people). If asked, many would probably only give the definition "omnipotence is being able to do anything". But "anything" doesn't necessarily mean "anything at all". People say to their children "you can do anything if you set your mind to it!" and that "anything" is not qualified explicitly, but it also is restricted to "anything that a normal human being can reasonably achieve given enough effort". If you pressed anyone on this issue, they wouldn't update their belief, they would update the definition they give you. Perhaps with omnipotence one would have the same result, where "being able to do anything" really means "being able to do anything not self-contradictory", and pointing that out doesn't change the belief, only the stated explicit definition. The reason I think this digression is interesting is that we're in a thread about "commonly held beliefs", and here we have a belief that is arguably about the definition of a word; but there is a missing step between believing that there can be omnipotent beings and producing one definition that would satisfy that belief, especially when multiple subtly different ones could be given, and not all of them are logically inconsistent or self-contradictory. It's a problem of epistemology and philosophy of language, of course, and not really about logic or theology.
Mind you, I don't think that any omnipotent being exists, not by any reasonable definition of omnipotent. I do believe one can make reasonable definitions of omnipotence that are consistent and logically possible; but there is no reason to believe that any such being exists.
As one of the posters above pointed out, I don't think you're particularly interested in discussing subtleties. Perhaps pointing out inconsistencies in this topic or argument doesn't change your belief of being right, but will just change the stated definition of "being right"... So I would like to extend a gentle reminder that discussions, even on the internet, do not need to be about being right. Sometimes nitpicking adds to the discussion, but it doesn't need to prove anyone wrong. We all get everything wrong all the time, but through talking about this stuff we all get a chance to learn something, to change a little. It really sucks that as soon as we _perceive_ the tiniest accusation of being wrong, we stop being kind and make huge asses out of ourselves to vindicate the truth of our superior, and usually very inconsequential, arguments.
I think when the average Christian or Muslim claims that God is omnipotent, they mean something like "God can do all logically possible things that don't fundamentally contradict its character."
Why's that matter?
Because the proof by contradiction you've constructed doesn't apply in their frame of reference.
There are plenty of reasons why some individuals might choose not to take a given vaccine. Some are rational, many are not.