A team of epidemiologists from across the country, led by researchers from Emory University, have launched an interesting defense of their profession in the June issue of the journal Science Advances with a critique of a story written by journalist Gary Taubes and published in Science magazine 27 years ago.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is hard to say at a time when epidemiology is in the pandemic spotlight where it has become as deeply intertwined with politics as with public policy.
Taubes in 1995 took the profession to task for too often treating correlations as causations and in that way reaching sketchy conclusions as to what does and doesn’t threaten human health at the population level.
“Widely viewed” is an interesting modifier in the context of the study given that the standard falls short of “universally accepted.” But, accepting “widely viewed” as the standard, the summary of the paper slightly undersells the success of epidemiologists in successfully making educated guesses based on limited data.
The paper itself concludes that the now nearly three decades of data gathered on some of those old predictions show the epidemiologists of three decades ago batted about .270.
Good or bad?
Many Americans, of course, like to believe in foolproof science. Those screaming “listen to the scientists” during the height of the still ongoing pandemic certainly did. No one was chanting, “Listen to the scientists; they’re right a quarter of the time!”
Some of the scientists in power likewise didn’t want to accept the possibility that their directives might be less than perfect.
There were those, top American officials among them, who tried to maintain a public belief in some sort of infallible, high priesthood of science by silencing scientists who did what scientists are supposed to do and questioned sketchy scientific conclusions leading to major public policy decisions.
Prasad understood that a lot of science is more grey than black and white.
Yes, there are blacks and whites. Newtonian physics hasn’t changed in 350 years. The apple still drops down from the tree, and not the other way around, because of the force of gravity. Objects at rest still remain at rest unless an outside force is exerted upon them.
Much science, however, is not black or white. It is gray because it is constantly evolving. We long ago learned smoking greatly increases the risks of people getting lung cancer, but we still don’t know for sure why most smokers don’t get lung cancer.
Accumulating evidence is pointing toward genetic mechanisms that appear to protect some people, but as has long been known from the study of the pandemic of obesity, genetic connections get incredibly complicated.
Further complicating this situation is the fact that not all people genetically inclined toward obesity are fat, and not all fat people are genetically inclined toward obesity. As researchers studying obesity at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health have observed, “genes are not destiny,” though they might be more so for smokers than for over-eaters.
Whatever the case, this is the messy scrum in which the reality of science exists. It is not governed by an all-knowing, all-seeing God but by ever-evolving research.
So is batting .270 good or bad?
Relativity
Well, as with so many things in life, it depends on the standard used to measure.
The epidemiological average is better than the .244 overall batting average for Major League Baseball players who earned an average annual salary of over $4.4 million last year, but well below the league-leading .328 average posted by Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Trea Turner. And nowhere near the .406 posted by the late Ted Williams in 1941.
The player nicknamed the “Splendid Splinter” was the last baseball player to hit above .400, although more than a half dozen did that in the early years of the professional sport.
Batting .270 would be a great average for a good-fielding catcher in the MLB today given that catchers overall are only hitting at .209 so far this year.
On the other hand, if you were a quarterback hoping to make the roster of an NFL football team, you wouldn’t have a chance with a passing completion percentage of 27 percent. Even Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, the high-profile quarterback for one season for the Denver Broncos, completed 47,9 percent of his passes before the entire league decided he wasn’t meant to be a quarterback.
Every other quarterback who played regularly was at least 10 percentage points better than Tebow, and 29 out of the 33 completed passes at the rate of more than 60 percent. Joe Burrow of the Cincinnatti Bengals topped the chart with a completion percentage of 69.9 percent.
All of this is offered mainly to underline just how relative to the whole the issue of percentages as a measure of success.
A messy world
Getting things right one out of every four times might appear a pretty bad performance, and I have to confess that if I’d been a member of the team involved in this study, it would have been hard not to argue in favor of just tossing the results in the circular file and moving onto to study something else.
The optics just don’t look good. But then maybe these epidemiologists were all golfers.
A 27 percent win rate for a golfer would be unprecedented. None has ever reached that standard. Tiger Woods got close at 26 percent in 2014 before suffering injuries and other problems. He kept playing, however, and now his percentage is down to 22.9 percent, just ahead of the late Ben Hogan who retired with a winning percentage of 21.3.
Woods and Hogan are golf legends, and they underperformed the epidemiologists still stung by Taubes’ reporting all these years later.
His “article prompted an immediate defense by the epidemiologic community,” they write “but together, these defenses have been cited eightfold less often than the original Taubes paper. Therefore, despite these contemporary objections, the Taubes article has exerted a sustained influence on epidemiologists’ self-impression and the impression of epidemiology in the wider scientific community. It has been cited more than 1000 times with most citations relying on the article to cast doubt on the value of epidemiologic research.”
Taubes could not be reached for immediate comment, and it should be noted in his defense there is a difference between casting doubt on the “value” of some difficult research versus the “predictive accuracy” of such research.
Epidemiology – the “study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of diseases, injury and other health-related events and their causes” – is not a simple science. Its value, as with many complicated sciences, is often as much in quantifying what doesn’t work as what does.
And there are simple things it can get right because they’re simple, like social distancing during the pandemic.
This has pretty much been known since the arrival of Covid-19, although there was a brief period there when the thinking was it could be transmitted by touch. Some will remember the great hand-washing frenzy.
That’s now been declared largely unnecessary. There are plenty of good reasons to regularly wash your hands, and maintain cleanliness in general, but Covid-19 is no longer the big concern.
Handwashing was one of those things epidemiologists thought vital at the start.
“Don’t stop washing your hands!” the Mayo Clinic News Network headlined in June 2020 as the pandemic was just beginning.
“As more communities open up and follow changing pandemic protocols, it’s good to remember one of the most important protections against COVID-19 is washing your hands.”
Or so it seemed. But it turned out to be one of those conclusions Taubes might have tagged “as having questionable merit.”
This is unfortunately how science usually works. There are often more unknowns than knowns, more questions than answers, more hypotheses theorized than proved. Professional opinions abound.
Given the value of accumulated knowledge, those opinions are invariably better than amateur opinions, but they are still opinions. And anyone who declares you should take their opinion as established fact because they are an all-knowing scientist – and there have been a few who have done this during the pandemic – should be disqualified as a scientist for a simple lack of understanding of what science is all about.
Taubes had a valid point to make in 1995, and it remains valid still.
Categories: Commentary, News
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Science is the belief that experts are wrong.
Both quotes attributed to Richard Feynman.
Listen to/follow the science should have told you to beware everything else they were selling with that slogan.
Paracelsus criticized fellow doctors 500 years ago for the same arrogance that we see in the CDC today.
Medicine suffers from mechanistic reductionist methods and token endpoints/proxies. The complexity of physiology and nature in general doesn’t justify pseudo-science.
Mr. White ,
Thank you for sharing the wisdom you have acquired.
Very well stated.
Sorry Craig, just want to clear up any confusion for your readers who might want to prevent Monkey Pox with a mask because the CDC said you could. (Place one of those laughing emojis here). Just “follow the science” right?
https://summit.news/2022/06/14/uk-health-agency-99-per-cent-of-monkeypox-cases-are-gay-men/
“Two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the universe.”
–Albert Einstein
People don’t know how science works, or is supposed to work. Scientist makes an observation, scientist then comes up with a theory to explain the observation. Then, and this is the kicker, scientist comes up with an experiment to try and DISPROVE, not prove his/her theory. If scientist cannot disprove the theory his/her theory may be true. Science does not prove things, it just gives explanations that have so far not been disproven. Human beings don’t find this comforting unlike religion which gives comforting absolute truth.
Yea, I have you back. I decided to dump FB over their desire to censor one of my comments.
Pretty interesting.
I guess from the way fauci demanded we kow tow to his dictates, a person would have thought he was all knowing. Instead he was a fraud. Fauci , facist , fraud . Strange twist of fate those words ar so similar in sound .
Well, if you follow the “real” science, it can tell us a few things like:
* There are only 2 genders. Boys are born with a penis and girls a vagina.
* Transgenderism is a mental disorder not to be celebrated.
* Global Warming is a trillion dollar Ponzi scheme. The climate changes every 3 months.
* You cannot prevent Monkey Pox by wearing a mask (right CDC). You can prevent it by keep your pants on.
* Covid has very little affect on children. Children should not be given any of these questionable Covid “vaccines” – period.
* The Covid “vax” should not have been given to most under 60yo, let alone forced upon them under duress.
Some of the worlds biggest money making schemes all in the name of “science”. I mean, this list could go on to include salmon….right????
So, I grade real science an “A”.
Phony Political “Science” an “F”
Mr Medred .
I guess you are right. Its relative . Newton said objects at rest tend to stay at rest . He was pretty good.
Yet was that statement fully correct? I believe no object is fully at rest . The atoms nearly always have movement inside. The earth is almost always moving within a moving solar system within a moving universe.
Perhaps newton would have been more accurate if he had quantified the statement and said – the object is at rest from the perspective of an unknowing observer.
In this case it seems fauci was either an unknowing observer or just a plain fraud. He doesn’t have Newtons significant excuse regarding minimal data and sub par measuring tools . Imo
Brian I would like to agree with you.
Your idea is nice simple and clean.
The question must be – is it fully accurate? Newton was right sort of .
Is it possible you have over simplified the determination?
chromosomes seem to usually state you are right but genetics is pretty complicated. Perhaps if we looked deep enough and listened hard enough we could understand the situation. Certain animals can adapt their sex to stimulus . Certain genes don’t express themselves except under certain conditions. What could we be missing?
Imo its foolish to have apparent men in women’s prisons, women’s bathrooms, women’s sports but it’s similarly questionable for anyone to proclaim there is no leeway regarding how a person feels or thinks beyond what appears on the outside. Certain groups of people have historical recognition of men who take women’s roles in society.. are we so all knowing that we can proclaim with absolute certainty that there are no gray areas? Have not our greatest philosophers recognized even the smartest among us know little with certainty?
I do understand your point though. It would seem there is only two sex s . Yet – what if ? What if we were wrong and were forcing our idea of reality on innocent people that really had little choice in their destiny regarding gender? Shouldn’t we make allowance for the possibility so as not To risk projecting our ideas onto someone we don’t even really understand? I would be embarrassed if I projected my in accurate opinions onto a group of people. Who am i to proclaim how someone else inherently feels inside? I would argue its an area that is not yet fully determined.
DPR, I stand by my statements. There are ONLY 2 genders. Boy meet girl. Are there some (very, very, very, very few) mutations along the way that grow this part or that part, make one foot without toes, or one arm shorter than the other, etc.. This is not the “science” of gender confusion. It is a genetic short circuit. “What if we were wrong and were forcing our idea of reality on innocent people that really had little choice in their destiny regarding gender? Shouldn’t we make allowance for the possibility so as not To risk projecting our ideas onto someone we don’t even really understand? “.
We aren’t wrong. The Dept of Ed is wrong and so is the Biden Admin.
Listen, if you are a guy and feel the need to dress like a woman, live like a woman or visa-versa you have a mental illness that needs to be addressed. One lady was in love with a Boeing 737 to the point of marriage. Now, we might say “isn’t that cute”, but clearly this woman has a mental disorder. Take a transvestite or whatever the correct term is or the Covid vax to stay on topic; we can call them a woman or vaccine all day, but that doesn’t make it so.
Bryan,
You could be right.. IDK
DPR, last week I ran across a Mormon woman. I started questioning her about this Joseph Simth character. What I found interesting was her understanding of the Bible, but clear devotion to the book of Mormon. Basically men become their own little gods in charge of their own planets and God was a man once of flesh and blood and has a wife and kids etc..
We know Joseph as a violent man who tried to murder those who opposed his craziness. We also know he was dragged out of his cell and shot.
So, who in their right mind would run off and join a cult that contradics the Bible that they know? Join a cult ran by the “prophet of the Americas”? What about the “prophet of Africa, Greenland, Antarctica, etc.? Where are their great prohets and books? My point being is just because someone claims to be a great “prophet” doesn’t make them so. Just some mentally unstable person taking advantage of more unstable people. I mean, I still see people wearing masks in their cars OVER Monkey Pox. Lots of mental illness out there due to the flood of childhood drugs.