[norswap]

I shouldn't enter into consideration, but it's a shockingly good heuristic to evaluate the credibility of people.

I repeatedly found that people who are thoughtful and not snarky — and often, nuanced — when discussing a topic I have no deep expertise on were much more correct on topics that I did have expertise on and could properly evaluate.

We're all on a time budget at the end of the day. And I do share the sentiment: the scientific literature in nutrition is known not to be very good. You don't have to be an expert, it suffices to notice that there are a lot of people coming to contradictory conclusions, and that the consensus seems to have changed drastically over the past decades, not being particularly driven by any groundbreaking changes in available scientific methods.

[KempyKolibri]

Ok, I don’t share that heuristic personally. That said, if that’s yours, then I encourage you to compare Teicholz’s output with, say, Walter Willett’s (who would take the position that SFA is a risk factor for CVD).

Teicholz is considerably snarkier than Willett so, even by that metric, you should lean in favour of Willett’s position that SFA is unhealthy, I guess?

[norswap]

A heuristic is a heuristic, and we can do some of our own research too. I was just defending the OP.

As for my personal position, I remember looking into things a while back and just coming away with the conclusion that nobody really seemed to know. If there's a truth here, it's either considerably more complex than "SFA good" / "SFA bad" (all these interacting pathways, man), or it just makes little enough difference not to matter at all in a way that we can meaningfully measure above the noise.

It seemed clear SFA are clearly not that deadly. Whether you'd be more healthy or live slightly longer if you chose to consume less of them, I have absolutely no clue.

[KempyKolibri]

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that replacing SFA with PUFA leads to a 20-30% reduction in cardiovascular disease incidence. Considering this is one of the top killers in the western world, this is massive.

I’m not sure how you’re determining that it’s otherwise?

[lemmsjid]

I partially agree with you but have some counter thoughts.

Tone is something that can be adopted intentionally or unintentionally. If you hear a pilot on a radio dryly say something in a calm and detached tone, it could be in the context of an emergency. Pilots are enculturated to adopt that tone (for various reasons). Meanwhile particular cultures have different levels of acceptability when it comes to tone: some cultures perceive other cultures as more angry, or detached, because of the norms of communication within those cultures.

In short, I think the tone of “calm, scientific detachment” is often weaponized to lend undeserved credibility to an argument, because people tend to believe people more when they adopt that tone.

Furthermore, tone does have a purpose if used alongside a well done argument. For example, in the article the OP linked to, there is a rather exhaustive refutation of the book in question. The tone of the author previews that their entire opinion on the book is negative, given all the arguments they put forth in their review. If the author of the review had adopted a calm and thoughtful tone, perhaps it would indeed have been more effective because the reader would decide. On the other hand, most people won’t read the entire review, so the tone of the author makes it clear what their opinion is.

That said I am not wholly disagreeing with you: would be interesting to do a study using some varying markers to identify tone, and identify, I don’t know, argumentative complexity, and see if snarkiness is associated with a lack of complexity. Assuming you can find markers with predictive power.

[norswap]

I think what actually convinces me more than tone is nuance. If you can fairly assess arguments on both sides, recognize when either side makes a good point, and mention when you're confused about your conclusion, or when some point of evidence doesn't mesh with the theory. Things that are all one-sided are usually wrong (though I suppose there are cases where the truth is indeed one-sided, it's just pretty rare, and less likely to be things that people that you otherwise consider serious would argue about).

Even that attitude can be weaponized I suppose, if nuance convinced more people, than more people would learn to fake nuance to push their favorite outcome. Though I'd like to think that the process would change them a little bit for the better too.