'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims

Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.

There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).

I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems.

My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great.

Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.

Yup, I'm "staggered".

Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)

> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected

As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.

However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.

Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.

Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.

- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.

- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.

- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.

- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."

Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."