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Comment by honkkong420 | Hacker News Reader

Idk, anecdotally I don’t think I’m right about my heterodox nutrition views because I’m more educated, I just observe the consensus view of eating 12 servings of grain per day is wrong because I feel worse listening to their advice than eating what I naturally prefer.

I don’t think education comes into play at all?

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Education must come into play. Your own case illustrates this, as there is no such consensus view.

And even granting the possibility that you are exaggerating for effect, it's hard to find a field of knowledge with more contention than dietary nutrition, so one has to be even more diligent about acquiring expertise and not fooling oneself.

Education matters for the consensus (for arbitrary reasons) but in my own life, my prior experiences with food inform my next meal. Education doesn’t come into play at all.

Let me pose this another way, why would you expect me to change the amount of bread i eat because of another year education? I already had 13 years of teachers telling me it should be the foundation of my diet and it didn’t stick. Why would the next year of education be any different?

The modern consensus (or perhaps official, since consensus may be different) is that you should be eating more vegetables than grains.

So you appear to agree with the consensus of experts that grains should not be the basis of your diet. This has been the us governments recommendation for over a decade (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyPlate)

They probably weren't in primary schooling in the last 11 years. They were probably taught the food pyramid over my plate, and disagreed with it.

Sure but "my personal experiences match up with the expert consensus from the past decade" (and really longer, the 2005 food pyramid was for slightly more grains than veggies, not double) isn't a particularly strong argument for disagreeing with the expert consensus.

If what you're saying is "I disagree with expert consensus from the 80s", well then sure, but so does the expert consensus! That's how the scientific process works (slowly).

My argument is that my prior experiences seem to work better for guiding my meal choice than all the formal knowledge presented to me.

Which is ironic considering what the discussion is about: you conducted your own scientific experiment on yourself, disproved the consensus-accepted rule, and came to new conclusions.

To achieve that, you needed to have enough confidence in yourself and your ability to measure and feel stuff (which some people think is bad, apparently) versus some consensus which purports to know better.

Courageous new science regularly blasts old knowledge and education to bits, and that's a good things.

And my point is that your failed to do even a trivial amount of research into what consensus is.

If "knowledge" was only what you were presented in primary school, the world would be a very different place.

You seem to be conflating "education", in the general sense, with education in a specific subfield.

I wouldn't expect another year of English literature, calculus, and nuclear physics courses to teach me anything about biology, civics, or textile manufacturing that I could apply to my day-to-day life, either—but a year of education in nutrition science, the practical workings of government, and traditional spinning and weaving techniques? That makes a huge difference.

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