by api | 2026-01-07 17:41:13+00:00
I think this is at least better than the old food pyramid, though not perfect. It's a step in the right direction.

What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or maybe, or whatever that was.

I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy" "natural" alt-med orbits have usually had better ideas about nutrition. They've historically been right about whole vs. processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs, sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines, wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be, mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.

I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school, then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.

Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they also knew how to extract petrol.

Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.

I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.

The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.

Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the establishment are usually not good. There have been historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that turned out to be right.

Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not, to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were worthless or wrong don't make the news.