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Ice Cream, Research, & The Negative Power of Epistemic Closure

The Atlantic has a fascinating story about a piece of nutrition research that challenged conventional wisdom to the degree that it has been difficult to get anyone to take it seriously.

An excerpt:

“Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.

“Earlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. The ice-cream signal was robust.”

What makes the story so interesting is that the article’s author, when he started doing his own research, found that the ice cream study wasn’t the first time these unexpected results came up.  There had been similar studies and results going back decades, but a cultural bias against ice cream prevented researchers from taking it seriously.  The data suggested that in many ways yogurt and ice cream could offer the same sorts of benefits, but traditional thinking prevented researchers from taking the latter possibility seriously.

“The problem with this line of thinking is that once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into the science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts,” The Atlantic writes.  “If the ice-cream effect can be set aside, how should we think about other signals produced by the same research tools?”

The story goes on:

“The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.”

You can read the entire story here.

Your Views:

It really is an interesting story, and makes me feel a little bit better about that Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip – one of the best ice creams in the world – that I ate last night.

It also teaches an important lesson about epistemic closure – which is another term for being closed-minded.  Just because you think the world is a certain way, or ought to be a certain way, doesn’t that it actually is that way.

The post Ice Cream, Research, & The Negative Power of Epistemic Closure appeared first on MNB.

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