More "common sense" jackassery with the recent science news that you don't really need eight glasses of water a day. Many comments throughout the internets are along the lines of: of course you don't need that much, prescriptive rules of how to live ignore that you should primarily listen to what your body says.
Ahh, it's nice to know that those with high cholesterol can eat whatever they want since that's proof of what their body wants. No medical issues there. And the morbidly obese, they got that way by listening to their bodies and purposefully overeating. And diabetics certainly don't need to change their diet or take insulin.
This is another example of people who don't understand science and feel that it's followed to the detriment of common sense. Social history is filled with forgotten common sense (in it's less kind form called superstition) that until examined by facts was more common than sense. What we're calling common sense is intuition based on quick pattern matching. Sometimes the patterns are right for the right reasons, sometimes right for the wrong reasons, and sometimes we end up with fear of witches based on eccentric behavior, adherence to slavery based on racial prejudice, or the somewhat more innocuous belief in astrology and mysticism.
This rant is makin' me thirsty.
I pause a bit when I consider that "science" has yet to deliver a consistent set of rules with regards to the proper diet (how many times have we been back and forth on eggs?).
Or would one argue that food marketing types have plucked morsels from reductionist exercises of nutritionists for example and shoved that in our collective faces? (i.e. Pepsi with vitamins!) Does science remain a neutral vessel of facts or is it simply a matter of ethics? Or that the scientific community doesn't do a sufficient job of qualifying their research to hedge against one-dimensional seizures of information before it's incorporated into a product for consumption?
Posted by: Mason at April 6, 2008 01:38 PMScience is regularly misquoted in the news. Where a study might report limited results, the media will take those cautious statements to unwarrented conclusions. Those conclusions are then often offered up as "obvious truths" that didn't need some expensive experiments to prove.
I don't like the misquoting of scientific studies ("global cooling!" http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94), but I like even less the blind ignorance of faith in "folk wisdom."
Posted by: sstrader at April 6, 2008 03:06 PM