Dukasaur wrote:Nothing in this article offers any evidence that IIT is wrong.
The only claims are that
- It's untested or untestable, and
- that it's got too much attention in the media.
Whether it's untestable I doubt. Many things seem untestable, until someone figures out a test. We'll see.
That it gets too much attention in the media is probably true, but hardly a serious condemnation. What the media chooses to write about is no reflection on the underlying science.
Similarly, I can't say the Palm reading medium on King Street is wrong either. But the general tenor in the public press is that there is more science backing up the computer analogy. Really, there isn't anything backing it up other than that it's a neat analogy. Even scientists can fall prone to this, like with the recent box jellyfish example. They are trying to upload the box jellyfish brain into a computer. Only trouble - no central nervous system.
That retraction rates of nutrition papers are up doesn't mean that the remainder are hogwash. On the contrary, it means that research institutions are cleaning house and upping the average quality of what remains.
Nope. The quality is still generally garbage because of one methodology that is anti-scientific. I refer to food diaries. The way most science in that division is done is questions like "In the past year how many grams of avocado did you consume in a week"? Literally no meaningful conclusion can be drawn by such studies. However, this is the accepted methodology of that field. It's not like I'm alone in calling this out, this has been realized for many years. Not only is there a "reproduction crisis" whereas the results are not reproducible. But the data is bad since it ignores biological processes (see the below link). The good type of nutrition research looks at individual metabolic processes at the molecular, cellular and system level. The vast majority of nutrition research only considers things at the individual or population level and they never even try to come to anything resembling a cellular explanation.
There are countless articles about how bad this field is. Take this one "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7350526/ " for example. They are focusing on the fact that most people just don't know how much they are consuming or they misrepresent it. My problem goes deeper than that. Even if I know precisely how many grams of avocado I ate per week, I don't think you can gather any meaningful information from such a study. All it could do is help cellular biologists know which molecules to check for possible effects. But we can do that already without the nutritional study. We really don't need anymore 12 person sample size self-reported study proving that 20g per day of avocado can lower your glycemic index.