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Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

Or, maybe some of us have lived experience where artificial food dyes have detrimental effects to our children. I don't need science to tell me what my own two eyes and lived experience says. Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?

My sibling comment goes into more detail, but claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.

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> Do I really need a double blind study to tell me that when one of my kids eats food laced with these dyes, he's crazy for a week, but when he eats candy w/o these dyes, he just is a normal kid with a sugar rush?

TBH this sounds like exactly the kind of things double blind studies are invented for.

Ok - here’s one. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2007/09/hyperactivity-in-...

But even if there were none that showed a link, I should just continue to feed my child something that would cause adverse reactions?

What’s crazy to me is … we are talking about a totally unnecessary food additive. It’s not like I’m arguing against some critical public health intervention to prevent a deadly virus. It’s a dye to make food turn a color.

Someone with one (1) anecdote is not an authority and shouldn't be trusted like one. Eroding trust in authorities by equating actual experts with somebody who has a half baked opinion based on an anecdote seems like the real issue to me.

Going around and assuming every opinion is based on objective reality instead of subjective experience filtered through human perception with all it's quirks is not a good way to arrive at truth.

I'm not asking to be treated or trusted like an authority. I'm just asking not to treat people, when sharing a lived experience shared with others (making this n>1), is told that their experience is "half baked". My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.

Arguing with me that I could not possibly have experienced a cause and effect because some people didn't hold enough large enough placebo controlled double blind studies (I say this because double blind studies have studied this exact phenomenon, and triggered the retraction of some of these dyes in other countries) is just insulting after a while.

We know so little about nutrition and how different individuals process different nutrients that the scientific consensus on healthy food habits, weight loss, etc have shifted dramatically over the years. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. A little humility would be nice in the face of what clearly is not working for the majority of the population.

I mean, it's just food dye for God's sake, what's the "scientific" argument that foods must contain artificial colors?

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm against unnecessary additives too. But you surely agree that anecdotes are bad source to inform your understanding on a subject where countless actual experts are available.

What can the actual experts tell me about my child's reaction to the food dye? One of my children has an adverse reaction to the dyes, my other children do not. What is the expert going to tell me? How does one get access to one of these experts? What about the studies that do show a link between behavior issues and artificial dyes? Are those studies not to be trusted?

Edit: curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study? If so, can you name it or an expert opinion on the matter that you trust?

Lots of parents probably follow similar lines of thinking about the effect of sugar on their kids' behaviour, and I think it's worth deferring to experts on that.

I'm not telling you to personally change your belief. What I was trying to say is that you're propping up the value of your individual opinion as if it should rival experts to the reader.

> [...] claiming that anyone who has a lived experience is stupid (aka, falling for a logical fallacy) is just accelerating the distrust of "authority" at a time when we need it most.

I'm saying that you making a mountain out of a belief does directly translate to a distrust in experts, in a way that telling somebody they might just be wrong/it was a coincidence/whatever couldn't do.

At the end of the day most people just see what the want or expect to see, when there isn't a strong enough correlation in another direction. That's why, a reader, one should not value any anecdote too highly.

> curious about your first sentence: what makes you against unnecessary food additives? Is it a double blind study?

The question reads like a gotcha, but I'll answer anyway: The fact that there aren't enough studies about many such ingredients, and that I don't have time to check which are definitely vs. lack data.

> What can the actual experts tell me about my child

That's the exact sort of distrust in authorities you purport yourself to be against.

> My lived experience is by definition my objective reality.

Just glossing over your complete misuse of objective here btw. There is nothing objective about your subjective* "lived realiy".

*Definition of subjective: 1. Dependent on or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world. / 2. Based on a given person's experience, understanding, and feelings; personal or individual.

Source: https://www.wordnik.com/words/subjective

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