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Comment by lamename | Hacker News Reader

As a neuroscientist, yes. But this is true of most science & medicine news written for a general audience. I have to tell my parents to stop reading "Chocolate is a superfood / Chocolate causes cancer" articles every year.

Uncertainty isn't good for engagement, even if it's correct.

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Nonlinear (and inverting!) response curves for drug dosimetry that's population and person specific. Especially when there's a temporal delay. Trying to explain grapefruit to my elderly parents is like pulling teeth.

> Trying to explain grapefruit to my elderly parents is like pulling teeth.

It is not that hard. It is a fruit roughly the same size and appearance as an orange, but more bitter. See! I explained it. :) Joking asside, what are you trying to explain about grapefruit to your elderly parents? Is it the weird way it interacts with certain medicines?

It can potentially double or triple the effective dose you’ll absorb of many medications, so weird doesn’t adequately describe it. “Potentially life-threatening” is better.

This is the first time I've heard of that. Glad I stumbled across this, even though I hate the taste.

Have you heard the one about lychee? There is some compound in them which can lower your blood glucose levels. The sugar from digesting the fruit will eventually push up your sugar levels, so it all ends up okay eventually, and the drop is relatively small. But if you already have a low blood sugar level, and eat a lot of lychee it can maybe even kill you. So don’t eat them for an empty stomach just to stay on the safe side.

That is my other “tasty fruit with a weirdly dangerous rare side-effect” fact.

I heard this before. (Perhaps even on hacker news.) The way i stored it in my brain is “grapefruit is weird, don’t eat or drink grapefruit juice when on medication. Why? It might make you ill or even kill you.”

Obviously that form is ovesimplified. But since I’m not a pharmacist, nor a doctor I can allow this simplification for myself because it “fails-safe”. That is it might make me refrain from eating grapefruit in a situation where I could safely do so, but it will save me from eating grapefruit in situations where it is not safe. It would be harder if I would need to remember that I must eat grapefruit in some situations and can’t eat in other situations.

The reason why I’m saying this is because this is how I would approach explaining this to someone. By oversimplifying to the point where the safe story is easy to remember. People already understand that they can’t mix alcohol and certain medications. So it is just one more thing you can’t mix with medication.

Grapefruit is a bad example, because it has a clear impact on the way certain medications are metabolized. That’s chemistry more than anything else.

But your overall point makes sense because so many of these claims are based on studies that boil down to “playing the carefully controlled odds.”

"The intensity comes down to how grapefruit's compounds mainly furanocoumarins inhibit CYP3A4. Normally, this enzyme would help break down psilocybin into psilocin and metabolize it out of your system. When CYP3A4 is inhibited, more psilocybin remains in your bloodstream longer, allowing for a higher concentration of psilocin to flood your brain at once. This rapid spike in active compound could overwhelm your serotonin receptors, particularly the 5-HT2A receptors, which are the primary target of psilocin." - Found that on erowid years ago, always thought it sounded silly (yet I copied it down ha) - maybe worth giving a go.

Here is a great review by Bailey and colleagues who discovered the risks of grapefruit in drug metabolism. It is from 2013. This is a GREAT example if genotype-by-drug interaction and why knowing your genotype can be extremely useful.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3589309/

>Our research group discovered the interaction between grapefruit and certain medications more than 20 years ago [1990s].1–3 Currently, more than 85 drugs, most of which are available in Canada, are known or predicted to interact with grapefruit. This interaction enhances systemic drug concentration through impaired drug metabolism. Many of the drugs that interact with grapefruit are highly prescribed and are essential for the treatment of important or common medical conditions. Recently, however, a disturbing trend has been seen. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of medications with the potential to interact with grapefruit and cause serious adverse effects (i.e., torsade de pointes, rhabdomyolysis, myelotoxicity, respiratory depression, gastrointestinal bleeding, nephrotoxicity) has increased from 17 to 43, representing an average rate of increase exceeding 6 drugs per year. This increase is a result of the introduction of new chemical entities and formulations.

I'm sure they felt the same trying to explain certain things to their child :)

Relevant comic, "The Science News Cycle"

https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

Another sign "big Carob" has taken over the health industry, pushing its "kids, it's healthier" lie. Chocolate, Wine and Cheese are the three vital food groups.

I can remember my mother giving me carob 50 years ago, because it is "healthier than chocolate". Never forget.

My mum was at least honest: she said, "it's kind of like chocolate but not as nice" and I think that's fair.

Surely you did not mean to miss out ice cream?

Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good For You? https://archive.is/quPv4

Disclaimer: I'm not a big wine drinker, but ice-cream here I come...

You can make a fantastic "mud-slide" with cheap ice cream and premade custard, and of course vodka, kahlua and baileys. So yes, I will admit ice cream to the pantheon. If you go fancy-schmancy and get gelati then I'll even admit fruit, as long as it's a strawberry daquiri

  > I have to tell my parents to stop reading

As a researcher myself, I really dislike that this is even a thing. I constantly have friends send me articles asking what I think about things (frequently the answer is "I have no idea" and/or "the paper says something different").

I'm livid about this because this erodes public trust in science. Worse, people don't see that connection...

I don't understand how major news publications can't be bothered to actually reach out to authors. Or how universities themselves will do that and embellish work. I get that it's "only a little" embellishment, but it's not a slippery slope considering how often we see that compound (and how it is an excuse rather than acting in good faith). The truth is that the public does not understand the difference in the confidence levels of scientists for things like "anthropomorphic climate change" vs "drinking wine and eating chocolate is healthy for you." To them, it's just "scientists" who are some conglomerate. It is so pervasive that I can talk to my parents about something things I have domain expertise and written papers on and they believe scientists are making tons of money over this while I was struggling with student debt. I have to explain when I worked at a national lab isn't full of rich people[0]. There's a lot of easier ways to make money... And my parents, each, made more than any of the scientists I knew...

[0] People I know that have jumped ship and moved from lab to industry 2x-3x their salary (these are people with PhDs btw).

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/oak-ridge-national-laborato...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/lawrence-livermore-national...

[Side note]: I wish we were able to be more honest in papers too. But I have lots of issues with the review system and the biggest is probably that no one wants to actually make any meaningful changes despite constant failure in the process and widespread frustration.

Yes. My dad cites the vaccilation of the science on whether or not eggs are healthy as the reason he places no trust in what scientists say. Of course, he is mistaking science reporting for the science itself, but he should be able to trust the media to accurately communicate the scientific consensus. It's one thing when we're talking about eggs or chocolate, but now he's skeptical of science reporting on global warming and COVID-19. And is that unreasonable? Why should he put a high credence in any science reporting going forward? He's a construction worker. He's not equiped to go read the journal articles for himself.

Of course, we haven't even touched on the replication crisis, of which thankfully my dad is blissfully unaware.

A funny one was I was visiting my parents for the holidays. They have the news on and it is talking about that $2T funding cuts. It shows a bunch of examples with like $50m to this, $500k to that, and then a random $10k to "youth break dancing." And I'm like "why is that there? Seems like rage bait. Why not list more big ticket items? It's $2T, $10k is a nothing at that scale." You guessed right, this started a fight. I wasn't even trying to say that the thing should be funded (though I have no issues. Sounds like just a recreational program. Who cares? It's not even "pennies").

A lesson I continually fail to learn is that it isn't about the actual things. Information is a weapon to many people. Not a thing to chase, to uncover, to discover, but a thing that is concrete and certain. I still fear the man that "knows", since all I can be certain of is that he knows nothing.

Yes it can be hard to convey numbers to the general public. Orders of magnitude are unintuitive unless STEM trained.

I'm not sure that's even enough. I have a physics degree and all I've learned is that my stupid brain can't understand those numbers except through equations and relations. I think this is the best you can get.

Money is also very weird since it compounds. Both large wealth and government money are completely different classes, as well as different from each other. People try to think of both those versions of money in relation to how they use money themselves. Which just leads to misunderstandings.

Sounds to me like you were focusing on the (negligible) impact, while they were upset on principle?

Correct. But it was impossible to convince them that the premise of the complaint was different from what they wanted to hear. Tribalism makes people want to fight.

How many such "pennies" projects were there? It could be that your parents understand that you can waste a lot of money throwing dollar bills out of the window. Most of the time these bills are full of waste such that the sum total of all such projects can equal the threshold of what you might think of as "real money".

I think you are failing to understand how much $2T actually is. That's 200m things you'd need to add up. That's nearly the population of America. It's more than the population of California, Texas, Florida, and New York combined. More than the number of square miles in California. If you started at the southern border of California, you could place a $10 bill side by side (the short side!) while traveling north you'd get more than half way through Oregon! [0] That's the number of things you need to add up, which is still far short of $2T

I cannot express how large of sum of money this is. Only that if you think you understand you're wrong (I do not understand). If you are indeed correct and a large portion of the money is composed of things costing under $1m then we're seriously SERIOUSLY fucked. Because a trillion is a million million.

As with most things, I have extremely high confidence that follows a power distribution (go look up Pareto). So there's going to be thousands of things more than $100m in cost.

So I'm extremely confident that if you're picking 10 examples to show on screen and of any single one of those values is under $10m then you're either grossly incompetent or showing rage bait. Because even $10m is chump change when we're talking about these numbers. You certainly aren't providing any meaningful communication to your viewers. At best you're accidentally grossly misrepresenting the problem. While I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor, extreme incompetence in your domain of expertise is no different from malice.

[0] a bill is 156mm x 66.3mm. California is 1,220km long. 1220000/0.063=19,365,079. Oregon is 580km long. $2T is so much fucking money you could place $100 bills side by side along the length of California and if you did this a thousand times you'd be $63.5bn shy of $2T. If you did it 1033 times you still be $1.5bn short.

I don't need to look up the Pareto Principle and I am well aware of the scale of 2 trillion dollars. I don't need a bunch of condescending examples about, thanks. As far as journalism goes, I call it a good thing to highlight to tax-payers wasteful spending and perhaps other people think responsible spending by the government is a good thing will as well. This is quite common the numbers are not always at the scale of trillions. Sometimes, you find a city, perhaps like Chicago, wants to raise a billion dollar property tax, but has spent 400 million dollars on supporting illegal immigration, largely to one corporation, for example.

Just because I'm giving examples does not mean they are condescending. I am helping put into terms the scale of these numbers. That even my examples are not something you can actually conceptualize. Honestly, I can't even imagine a dollar side by side spanning a few city blocks.

I agree there's massive amounts of wasteful programs at that scale. But massive amounts of them gets you nowhere close to the actual number. That's the point.

That's because TV news is an entertainment program similar to a reality TV show. It's designed to enrage you with terrible news even when the reality is quite different and things are not that dire. When I realized it I stopped watching it.

I've also stopped watching TV entirelly when they shutdown analog TV as that was a nice natural ending of the traditional TV. Continuing required a repeated action (buying MPEG2 tuners when it was obvious that newer codecs will be used in a few years) and it was very easy to just do nothing instead.

>and then a random $10k to "youth break dancing." And I'm like "why is that there? Seems like rage bait.

This, but also the implication is that if they'll waste $10k on break dancing, then they must be wasting similar amounts on thousands of other programs and the leave it for the reader to imagine what those might be and get angry about whatever they made up in their mind.

  > then they must be wasting similar amounts on thousands of other programs

See my response here. You're greatly underestimating how much a trillion is. Probably a million times more than you think I'm implying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653038

No, I'm not underestimating it, I'm explaining how other people think.

Classic https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

> The truth is that the public does not understand the difference in the confidence levels of scientists for things like "anthropomorphic climate change" vs "drinking wine and eating chocolate is healthy for you."

The problem is that without science and stem foundations it is very hard for people to even understand what is and isn’t known.

My mum used to send me all kind of articles about chakras. “there are kids born now who have their sixth chakra open” and “this chakra is orange, and that chakra is indigo”. One day my mom, my then girlfriend, and me were chatting about what specialisation my girlfriend is thinking about pursuing at medical school. She told her that she is thinking about specialising in endocrinology. My mom become really angry and cided us for using such “big words” to “lord our education over her”. So to placate her we explained that it is a doctor who studies hormones, measures hormone levels and treats diseases of the hormone system. She got visibly surprised and the only things she asked “you can measure hormones?”

The conversation continued of course but that question, and the genuine surprise on her face remained with me. The thing is, she trully did not know that we can measure hormones. And if you don’t know that hormones are as real as the legs of the table, and chakras are as real as santa claus, then they both sound equally plausible theories about health. And when you race the stories against each other “i’m not feeling well because my heart chakra is blocked, and I need healing crystals and massages to get well again” vs “i’m not feeling well because my thyroid gland is not producing enough thyroxine, and i need to take suplements in a pill form” then the first one wins because it is simpler and neater sounding. But one is kinda bulshit and the other is a real thing. But you won’t know that unless you understand that we can measure hormones, and nobody even has any idea what it would mean to measure a chakra.

Ok, but you make it sounds like the vast majority of people are under such impressions. A lot of people in this thread imply that having a STEM degree confers god-like insight over the plebes that don't have one; I think it is a bit of ironic arrogance. For instance, this thing about the "confidence levels of scientists" for climate change; there is a well-known issue with this myth of a "97% consensus" on that topic. As well, many people think critics of "climate policies" are rubes that "don't know teh science stuff" but actually most do accept humans have contributed to some climate change (but don't agree to the extent that lefts claim when they say migrants come to the US because of it) but rather they disagree about what to do about it.

> but you make it sounds like the vast majority of people are under such impressions.

I don’t known what the vast majority thinks. I haven’t talked with them.

  > this thing about the "confidence levels of scientists" for climate change; there is a well-known issue with this myth of a "97% consensus" on that topic.

You're right, but what's your point? It's definitely above 80% and I've never met a climate scientist or someone working on adjacent research that doesn't believe it (given I've worked at national labs, that is a large number).

I do agree we shouldn't embellish things. That this actually undermines a point rather than strengthens it. If that's your point, I'm with you.

I also agree that a lot of stem people are too arrogant. This is especially common in CS and there's a strong negative stereotype that I think people should be aware of.

Honestly, it sounds like you strongly agree with my original statement. How science communication is doing serious harm to public perception of science. I'm not saying abandon education btw, just that we're doing a bad job when optimizing for views rather than strongly constraining for maintaining integrity and honesty

  > My mom become really angry and cided us for using such “big words” to “lord our education over her”.

Sounds like a skill issue.

Joking aside, I think one of the most important things anyone can learn in life is being comfortable not knowing and being comfortable asking. As a researcher I don't understand other researchers who have such high confidence and are happy to claim they understand when a low threshold is obtained [0]. Personal I feel as I learn a subject I only get to "oh I think I might get this" to only then find a new rabbit hole. Though, personally, I enjoy this. It's why I research ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not sure how to teach that but I'm at least happy to say I don't know. Like how I totally forgot what an endocrinologist did until you said it lol. There's no shame in not knowing things. But I'm guessing your mom (like my parents) is very uncomfortable with not knowing things. In that case, any answer is better than no answer. Because knowing is valued over understanding. I do think there's social aspects that reinforce this, but I'm not sure what to do besides demonstrate my own stupidity lol

[0] I find people's judgement of understanding a subject is extremely subjective. Even when we remove the set of cases where it's being said to placate another or move a conversation along. I mean honest proclamations.

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