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Quite a bit of the accepted "scientific" knowledge is wrong, and a lot of people will fight for it vigorously without noticing, or otherwise thinking. Even here on hacker news, and other scientifically minded forums, I've been called a quack for pointing out that: - the "calories in - calories out" (and especially the carb=4kc/g, protein=4kc/g, alcohol=7kc/g, fat=9kc/g and nothing else matters) is fragile, based on a chain of unproven assumptions, and has countless counterexamples (in other words, scientifically wrong, even if it is somewhat useful for ~80% of the population). - dietary cholesterol was NEVER shown to be correlated with anything bad. serum cholesterol was shown to be correlated with heart attacks and higher probability of other events, but dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol are almost uncorrelated. - sodium intake is correlated with high blood pressure only for 20% of the population. For 80% of the population, sodium intake does not raise blood pressure. - you need water, but if you are healthy, you can skip food for 40 days with many benefits and no irreversible damage. - you do not need B12 in your food if you are healthy (and your intestinal cultures are healthy), and animals can't make it any better than humans can, so this argument for requiring meat consumption is utterly wrong. - red, yellow and blue do not constitute a "primary color" basis with respect to addition - you can't even make green! (red green and blue almost do; no 3 colors can cover the whole human eye visible gamut, but specific red. green and blue maximize this coverage). I've had a chance to talk to Danny Shechtman (nobel laureate in chemistry, awarded for discovering and documenting the quasi-crystal structure). It turns out that this "make bad decisions with confidence" is not limited to "naive ideas and simple ignorance" - the greatest minds of the century, first among them Linus Pauling, refused to consider his discoveries. (In fact, the definition of what a crystal is was revised to account for quasicrystals, but this was done only after Pauling passed away). There are horror stories behind the nobels given to McClintock ("jumping genes"), Warren (helicobacter pilori is the immediate cause for stomach ulcers), Shechtman, and I would assume many other great discoveries. |