Amerika

Every discipline makes its own conventions as a means of keeping outsiders removed from any kind of power over it. If you have your own dialect, procedures, and rules then outsiders find they have a barrier before they can see what you are doing.

In addition, every discipline makes linguistic corner-cutting into an artform by using specialized language. When context shifts to the discipline, words convey a very specific meaning that also lumps in a number of implications, making them easier than typing out sentences explaining their meaning.

For these reasons among others, when reading “The Science” one must take some rather studious steps to figure out what is being said, and then work it past the usual inverse causation problem, which uses a correlation to rationalize from assumptions (this is the opposite of how science “should” work).

First, consider the nature of inverse causation:

You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

People see wet streets and then rain, and since they saw the streets first because humans pay attention to human concerns first, they make the association that rain is the result of these. The most common variety of these concern people of lower IQ being poor, with the assumption that poverty causes low IQ.

Human solipsism demands that we relate what other humans understand to the phenomenon, so we filter out the stuff that scares us like inequality of ability and instead draw inferences that we like because they fit within our assumptions, effectively rationalizing from those.

In this case, we are using the term rationalize in the vernacular:

b: to attribute (one’s actions) to rational and creditable motives without analysis of true and especially unconscious motives
rationalized his dislike of his brother

broadly: to create an excuse or more attractive explanation for
rationalize the problem

To rationalize is to create an excuse and justification in order to end cognitive dissonance. Instead of admitting that the situation sucks eggs, one finds a way to explain it as part of a higher, broader, deeper, or more moral big idea that makes it okay to our minds that the situation is bad.

This creates the inversion. Instead of looking at the cause of what we are seeing, we look at the effect and assign it a cause that fits our need for mental convenience. Wet streets cause rain because we control streets, but we cannot control rain.

With that in mind, we can read “The Science,” keeping in mind that it is buried in jargon and specialized symbolism mostly as a defensive measure. Take, for example, this relatively positive article about the effects of chocolate on health:

During 1,608,856 person-years of follow-up (mean [SD] of 19.0 [4.2] years), 25,388 deaths occurred, including 7,069 deaths from CVD, 7,030 deaths from cancer, and 3,279 deaths from dementia. After adjustment for a variety of covariates, compared with no chocolate consumption, the HRs (95% CI) for all-cause mortality were 0.95 (0.92 to 0.98), 0.93 (0.89 to 0.96), 0.97 (0.90 to 1.04), and 0.90 (0.84 to 0.97) for <1 serving/wk, 1 to 3 servings/wk, 4 to 6 servings/wk, and ≥1 serving/d of chocolate consumption, respectively (P for trend = .02). For CVD mortality, compared with no chocolate consumption, the HRs (95% CI) were 0.96 (0.91 to 1.01), 0.88 (0.82 to 0.95), 1.06 (0.93 to 1.21), and 0.92 (0.80 to 1.05) for <1 serving/wk, 1 to 3servings/wk, 4 to 6 servings/wk, and ≥1 serving/d of chocolate consumption, respectively (P for trend =.45). For dementia mortality, compared with no chocolate consumption, the HRs (95% CI) were 0.91 (0.84 to 0.99), 0.89 (0.80 to 0.99), 0.97 (0.79 to 1.18), and 0.97 (0.80 to 1.18) for <1 serving/wk, 1 to 3 servings/wk, 4-6 servings/wk, and ≥1 serving/d of chocolate consumption, respectively (P for trend = .95). Chocolate consumption was not associated with cancer mortality.

This looks like… math. Immediately 98.6% of the readers have fled to the hills. This reminds them of long boring classes where you had to memorize formulas in order to apply theory that has no bearing on how you conduct your everyday life, then get tested on it so they can see who is most obedient.

Keep reading:

The results suggest a modest inverse association of chocolate consumption with mortality from all causes, CVD, or dementia, specifically for moderate chocolate consumption of 1 to 3 servings/wk.

If you look closely, you can see that this is a correlation study and that lower consumption of chocolate has a very mild correlation to better health outcomes, but that it is also mildly better than not consuming any chocolate.

What can we infer from this? Does chocolate cause health? Or does health cause moderate consumption of chocolate? Keep in mind that this is statistical, so they have averaged answers from a wide variety of people, including the obese and those with preexisting health problems.

Consuming moderate amounts of chocolate means that you are avoiding even worse junk food and, more importantly, seem aware of what you eat and focused on finding something of relative quality. The true junk food gobblers have probably gone for lower-cost options.

Then we should consider genetics in who munches down a bit of chocolate every now and then:

Using UK and US cohorts, we test the hypotheses that genetic variants related to taste are more strongly associated with consumption of black coffee than with consumption of coffee with milk or sweetener and that genetic variants related to caffeine pathways are not differentially associated with the type of coffee consumed independent of caffeine content. Contrary to our hypotheses, genetically inferred caffeine sensitivity was more strongly associated with coffee taste preferences than with genetically inferred bitter taste perception. These findings extended to tea and dark chocolate.

Many of these chocolate eaters are simply people who prefer bitter food to sweet on a genetic level. They like dark chocolate and black coffee over sweetened alternatives, a preference which likely extends to other food groups as well.

In other words, the cause of this health outcome may be that people who eat better live longer. There are also the usual minor effects, such as the observation that some compounds in chocolate stimulate heart health:

In healthy humans, flavanol-rich cocoa induced vasodilation via activation of the nitric oxide system, providing a plausible mechanism for the protection that flavanol-rich foods induce against coronary events.

It is unclear however that these small amounts have much to do with overall health. More likely, we are seeing a correlation read backward: scientists think chocolate causes health, but more likely, those who prefer chocolate to other alternatives tend to be healthier.

In a relatively short period of time, “The Science” went from opening worlds to generating misleading data. Not surprisingly, much of this happened after the field became choked and it was necessary to publish distinctive and eye-catching material in order to get noticed and promoted.

Tags: causation, cocoa, Realism