(Posted by Patrick Sullivan Jr.)
I noticed a very interesting headline this morning while walking my dog and reading Instapundit2go on my crackberry, Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus.
...groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.
Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.
...
After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee’s report was written by a nonscientist “relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted.”
That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”
A really interesting story in the Old York Times. I'll have to buy the book.
A few other semi-random / semi-related thoughts:
I wonder where John Tierney stands on the scientific consensus that man-made greenhouse gases are going to flood Manhattan before my grandkids get to go to a Broadway play? (Apparently, he's skeptical. Good. :)
Iatrogenic disease is the third leading cause of death (reg required). (Iatrogenic = "Doctor caused")
Most Democrats want the government (a single-payer system) to have more (total?) control over a broken disease-care system. (I thought you guys were anti-Big Pharma? Don't you know those are the ultimate winners of Hillary-Care? If that would have passed in 1993, would you have liked Bush-Cheney-Haliburton in charge of your medical decisions for the last 7 years?)
It's sad to see that one (misled? confused? biased?) researcher has screwed all of us for the past 50 years. (The Truth About Fats)
- Or that one derranged Nazi convinced other Nazi's to murder millions of Jews.
- Or that Darwin wanted to explain away the Biblical story of creationism.
- And it's absolutely s frightening to consider that ANYONE can publish ANYTHING -- true or false -- and do it completely ANONYMOUSLY, and have it accessible to EVERYONE. (Scared of technology? No. Saddened by how it's abused. Always.)
