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by franktankbank 152 days ago
Lived experience is not really weak evidence though. Personally I use tallow minimally but it seems like a really good high flash point oil.
3 comments

> Lived experience is not really weak evidence though.

Lived experience is definitely weak evidence because it is riddled with bias. This is why we have blinded studies.

>but it seems like a really good high flash point oil.

On what basis? Using the list of smoke point table someone else linked[1], tallow does indeed have a high smoke point, but it's unclear how it's better than many other oils in that list (peanut, sunflower, soybean) which are far easier to procure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...

Anyone who lives near beef operations can get unprocessed tallow for free.
Most people do not live near "beef operations". Moreover processing tallow is part of procurement. If you value your time at the prevailing minimum wage, it's pretty hard to beat a gallon of vegetable oil for $10.
>Most people do not live near "beef operations".

Yeah, but lived experience shows that a lot of people do.

The entire concept of "lived experience" is, bluntly - absolute bullshit. You take all the worst aspects of both conscious and unconscious biases as well as anecdotal 'evidence', and wrap it up in the fact that the average person is simply not capable of objectively analyzing themselves[0], and you end up with people saying that demonstrably false things are true simply because that's how they [incorrectly] interpreted their "lived experience," or how their "lived experience" supports their decisions. This last part is particularly true with politics and nutrition, where people make decisions not based on objective data but based mostly on how they were raised and what they like.

I can spend decades eating junk food and lose weight as long as I work out long enough and hard enough. My "lived experience" tells me that junk food is fine simply because it hasn't killed me yet.

[0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.

> [0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.

What shape is the distribution of driving ability? It seems entirely plausible that most drivers are decent and a smaller population are bad enough to pull the mean down well below the median.