I absolutely love these Moynihan solo episodes. Moynihan’s general depth and Hitchian intellection get full room to shine while engaged in conversation. More of this please.
Just wanted to say that I'm thankful this year that my subscription affords me commenting privileges. This is me lording them over all you freeloaders. Perhaps that makes me a bit of a Thanksgiving Grinch, but at least I'm a Thanksgiving Grinch with 10 bucks to contribute.
I stopped this episode 2/3's of the way through just to comment that I've been a paid subscriber for almost five years now, and that this interview is definitely in my top-5 favorites, and I'm having trouble thinking of 4 that were better. Awesome guest, can't wait to read his books, and if Alan is a subscriber, if you're ever down in Charlottesville, I'll buy you a beer.
Amazing prediction! I also think Paul Offit would have made a great guest on this topic. Great science communicator, very humble about what science has gotten wrong, very chill. Also wrote a fabulous book "Do you Believe in Magic?" Revealing the massive profits and lack of regulation in the supplements/alternative medicine industries. Just bought Alan's book and will be reading it asap. Thanks Kathleen!
I am gonna pass. I don't need another long, insult filled, frothy mouthed takedown of RFK. The guy ain't perfect, but to act like he is somehow worse or exceptional compared to what has been is kind of nuts to me. Also, until he actually does something, this is like watching the NFL draft. What happened to bitching about things that have actually happened instead of going nuts about things that might happen.
There’s no “might” about it. The current admin appears to be balls deep in #MAHA and some real changes may be coming. Plus he has a long track record to which to refer. This is not some hypothetical.
Hey, if that's your thing, go with it. I just think there are a lot of not totally insane people out there with entirely different hobby horses that are willing to give the guy a chance. If we were to start eliminating politicians for comments they made about things they have no control over, could never actually do... actually now that I think about it, yeah we should just start doing that. I want a whole new set anyways. :D
At a minimum we should make them wear weird hats or something as a penance for fucking up so consistently for so long. :D Btw, I am not a real big RFK stan, but he was appealing to me as an alternative to what we had for president. But this guy over on 2way is prolly the best kind of "defense" for RFK I have seen. I ain't a doctor, I don't have kids, and when I look for what people find appealing about RFK this guys 10 min blurb I think best characterizes the allure, fwiw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISK2ou970dk
I am not trying to be pedantic here (is that even the right word) but about 10 words after saying there is no "might" about it, you say changes "may" be coming. When these things happen, and they are actually bad, I will be right next to you wiht pitchfork and whiskey in hand to step on ol wormbrain's nuts. But until then, its an awful lot reaction with no action to speak of.
Great outro music today ❤️I love Andy's statement that shared belief & shared world view are not the same (huge) and I also agree with the assertion that lifestyle & affluence play gigantic roles in weight & health matters. I wish the Covid part of conversation would've included an acknowledgment that reliable scientific data was available early on and suppressed (like Bhattacharya study proving that Covid appeared to have already been a great deal more prevalent/present than assumed). The fact that disagreement & discussion were not only not permitted but were punished should always be an important part of a Covid mea culpa imho
Great interview and great guest. I live in a geographic divide, straddled between immigrant ag workers whose children I work with every day, and extreme wealth (Ojai, Montecito, Malibu). We talk in class about who "gets" to shop at the "good stores" for food. It nearly always comes back to kind of what Alan said: you can find great food even at the Dollar Store. It's not about where you're getting it, it's about what you're buying and paying attention.
Wish he would've gotten into the meat and dairy ag world, but that's a dedicated discussion. Anyway, excellent talk and thanks for the timely release.
Incredible to hear Alan articulate the exact same warning about arguing with conspiracy theorists that Moynihan has mentioned so many times before. Truly, kindred spirits.
Alan is really straw manning here—yes, RFKJ talks about dyes and chemical additives, but this isn’t by any means exhaustive of what Alan refers to as the “naturalistic fallacy.” RFKJ also talks about the importance of exercise, eating whole foods, avoid highly addictive, nutrient-deficient, ultra-processed foods, and a host of other environmental and behavioral issues that Alan himself endorses.
Defaulting to the “most natural” available option in any scenario is a heuristic some of us prefer to use in life. That doesn’t mean we can never take pharmaceuticals. Trusting and deferring to technological innovation and institutional authority by default is simply another heuristic. That doesn’t mean you never use functional herbs (coffee, tea, etc.). Both are shortcuts, and most people operate using one or the other when making simple decisions. Why the hysterics about people who use a different heuristic from your own when both allow for exceptions and each has it’s own costs and benefits?
That’s a fair point—“hysterics” is relevant to the broader media landscape, not to Moynihan and Alan in particular. Although describing RFKJ as “incredibly dangerous” is still pretty overblown, imo. It’s more of a knee-jerk, visceral aversion to RFKJ in the case of Michael and Alan.
I dunno, if I met a guy who wanted to throw people in jail for having the incorrect opinion on climate change…I might think handing him any kind of power is a little dangerous. And I wouldn’t think I’m hysterical for feeling that way…
Yes, I would agree with this point wholeheartedly. We do need to maintain a critical eye when evaluating anyone who sets the agenda and policies. I guess my main intention is to draw more attention to the fact that, as Alan himself suggests—though he only made this point when discussing RFKJ’s worldview—we are all running on heuristics and default assumptions about the world. I would, at bottom, appreciate if this was acknowledged across the board. “I trust scientific consensus by default because the benefits of unrestrained innovation outweigh the harms” is as heuristic, as is “I distrust individuals with a conspiratorial frame of mind because they’re prone to amplify false positives in their search for corruption.” We didn’t vote to sign off on the most naively idealistic and sometimes absurd comments RFKJ made over the last 10 years, we voted on the belief that a heuristic which will inevitably lead to false positives will ultimately serve us better at this moment in time than the one that has produced so many false negatives in recent years.
Highly addictive nutrient deficient ultra processed foods is, itself a strawman. Ultra processed has no meaning and is dumb. Nutrient deficient means what, exactly? Cheerios vs Special K vs Total? Highly addictive is code for “tastes really good.”
Not at all. “Ultra-processed” is shorthand for foods designed by scientists, produced in a factory setting, and consisting primarily of ingredients that are unrecognizable in the context of most culinary traditions. From an evolutionary standpoint, we have no history consuming large amounts of refined sugars, rancid fats, chemical preservatives, and ingredients processed to such an extent that they bear scant resemblance to the actual plants and animals from which they are derived. Many such ingredients have been shown to increase metabolic dysfunction, slow the release of appetite-regulating hormones, and damage the microbiome, to name just a few unforeseen consequences that have direct bearing on poor nutrient absorption and subsequent overconsumption. Fixating on single ingredients, artificial dyes, for example, and not recognizing the causal role ultra-processed foods play in promoting overeating, obesity, and negative overall health is to miss the forest for the trees.
I totally agree with your analysis. Actually, this interview annoyed me a lot, and probably for pretty special personal reasons, but it seems like i'm in the minority.
Levinovitz said the exact same things about food/diets/additives/weird worldviews that my sis in law says, and she is a registered dietician. (She had a client in KY who had never eaten a piece of fruit!)
One challenge to what he said: There was a time when low income people grew some veggies to supplement their diets. This practice could be revitalized - it's not hard and seeds are cheap. I learned how to grow stuff from my mom when she was divorced and very broke.
It's true that urban dwellers will struggle, but that's only 1/3 of the poor. Drive through the poorest parts of NC/SC/GA/KY/TN and they have yards. Planting in the ground is a $25 shovel, elbow grease and a hose. (I have never once used fertilizer) Perhaps it doesn't cross people's minds that they could grow food themselves - and that is the lost art.`
I loved this interview. I came to heterodoxy (I know, I know, I’m rolling my eyes too) by way of skepticism and the things this conversation canvassed were once the life’s blood of skepticism. The big S Skeptics left me behind, as they got more woke and less skeptical, but I’m always happy to see small s skeptics still doing the work. I’m off to Amazon to buy that guy’s book!
Yeah, they’re the big ones I meant. I was dismayed by Elevatorgate; pissed off about Harriet Hall and consider them distinctly unskeptical about youth transition…
I admit to being a bit tender about Hall. As a veteran, she was a hero to me because of her military career. And I originally came to skepticism through my experiences raising a disabled child. My daughter has cerebral palsy, and you wouldn’t believe the snake oil salesmen who come calling when you have a kid in a wheelchair. So, Hall’s work against alt med resonated with me so much. I raised my kids to be critical thinkers. My daughter is now 37 and has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology.
that was my path as well. the sgu was the first podcast i regularly listened to, & i stuck with them for almost a decade, i think. but at some point i realized they were annoying me as much as enriching me.
i think the tipping point was when i heard a host use 'latinx' unironically. they also had some commentary around the floyd riots that made me realize these were not my kinds of people.
Same, although I tapped out a little earlier. I was baffled by the Elevatorgate thing, but what really got me was when Rebecca Watson’s crew of “Skepchicks” rounded on Harriet Hall who was exponentially more accomplished than any of them. She was a physician who had done actual research-based skepticism for years. But Watson et al deemed her insufficiently ‘feminist’ (despite the fact that, as the Air Force’s first female Flight Doctor she was an actual real-life feminist icon), and inadequately up to date on all the LGBT terminology that the Stepchicks felt necessary. That was the end for me. Even after Watson left to focus more on her activist ‘work,’ I had such a bad taste in my mouth I never went back. Later, Steven Novella (who worked with Hall at Science-Based Medicine) retracted her modestly favorable review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage. Jesse Singal reported on this and it reinforced my feeling that the SGU had left me behind.
elevatorgate was definitely a warning flare. i followed that harriet hall business via twitter, and that was definitely another really dispiriting tipping point. david gorski in particular has shown himself to be an absolutely dink in the aftermath of all that as well. he probably always was, i suppose, but it was easy to handwave away or even support his jerkiness when i thought he was on the side of angels.
There's a fallacious mode of argument where people, for whatever reason, refuse direct engagement with a particular idea and instead take a step back and hand-waive at a more general, less defined idea that they claim trumps the need to address the original idea.
Moynihan does a good job addressing this early on in this episode, using the example of one person shoving an old lady into traffic and another shoving an old lady out of traffic—saying that you can't step back and hand-waive them both together into "people shoving old ladies around," which was correct.
However minutes later, Levinovitz touted his penchant for engaging in this exact mode of argument, calling it "arguing the shape of people's beliefs" rather than their actual beliefs. He gave the example of someone claiming the Keto diet cured their diabetes, and said his favorite response to this is, "Every other diet dating back to Taoist monks claims to cure people too. What about those?"
Well, exactly /who/ is claiming that /which/ diets cured /what/ diseases? Are you saying Taoist monks knew about diabetes? What are you getting at?
The problem here is he started with a specific example (Keto vs Diabetes), and instead of addressing the specific claim, took a step back and hand-waived that all "diets" claim to "cure" people (not of any specific disease, but just "cure" in general), and his big gotcha was "So what about all the other diets that claim to cure people?"
Well, much of diabetes management is all about managing blood sugar spikes, which as I think every doctor that treats it would agree, can be managed by limited carbohydrate diets—so it makes sense that a diabetic on Keto would see a huge benefit. But I guess that doesn't matter, because "all diets" claim to "cure people," so checkmate?
I would argue that the entire mode of argument is bad, and that if you're not prepared to get into the weeds and be specific, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to argue against it at all.
I know that makes it hard to debate with people like RFK Jr, but the world doesn't owe us easy arguments. Welcome to Earth.
I absolutely love these Moynihan solo episodes. Moynihan’s general depth and Hitchian intellection get full room to shine while engaged in conversation. More of this please.
Pretty sure he doesn’t read the comments so we’re safe complimenting him here
Welch reads them
He’d read them if there were hot chicks here.
Point
Just wanted to say that I'm thankful this year that my subscription affords me commenting privileges. This is me lording them over all you freeloaders. Perhaps that makes me a bit of a Thanksgiving Grinch, but at least I'm a Thanksgiving Grinch with 10 bucks to contribute.
I stopped this episode 2/3's of the way through just to comment that I've been a paid subscriber for almost five years now, and that this interview is definitely in my top-5 favorites, and I'm having trouble thinking of 4 that were better. Awesome guest, can't wait to read his books, and if Alan is a subscriber, if you're ever down in Charlottesville, I'll buy you a beer.
I love being right so much. It is one of my least adorable qualities.
https://www.wethefifth.com/p/members-only-236-here-comes-the-nanny/comment/77912412?r=7enhd&utm_medium=ios
I suggested Alan as a guest years ago, I think shortly after his naturalistic fallacy book came out. This is all very exciting.
Really enjoying the convo. I guess I’ve found my next read.
All hail Kathleen! The Moynihan whisperer
We really should start listening to you one of these days
I keep saying this
Amazing prediction! I also think Paul Offit would have made a great guest on this topic. Great science communicator, very humble about what science has gotten wrong, very chill. Also wrote a fabulous book "Do you Believe in Magic?" Revealing the massive profits and lack of regulation in the supplements/alternative medicine industries. Just bought Alan's book and will be reading it asap. Thanks Kathleen!
Brava, Kathleen!
I am gonna pass. I don't need another long, insult filled, frothy mouthed takedown of RFK. The guy ain't perfect, but to act like he is somehow worse or exceptional compared to what has been is kind of nuts to me. Also, until he actually does something, this is like watching the NFL draft. What happened to bitching about things that have actually happened instead of going nuts about things that might happen.
There’s no “might” about it. The current admin appears to be balls deep in #MAHA and some real changes may be coming. Plus he has a long track record to which to refer. This is not some hypothetical.
Him saying we should jail climate change deniers is all the evidence I need to not want him near any levers of power, ever.
Hey, if that's your thing, go with it. I just think there are a lot of not totally insane people out there with entirely different hobby horses that are willing to give the guy a chance. If we were to start eliminating politicians for comments they made about things they have no control over, could never actually do... actually now that I think about it, yeah we should just start doing that. I want a whole new set anyways. :D
Throwing them all out does sound tempting…
At a minimum we should make them wear weird hats or something as a penance for fucking up so consistently for so long. :D Btw, I am not a real big RFK stan, but he was appealing to me as an alternative to what we had for president. But this guy over on 2way is prolly the best kind of "defense" for RFK I have seen. I ain't a doctor, I don't have kids, and when I look for what people find appealing about RFK this guys 10 min blurb I think best characterizes the allure, fwiw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISK2ou970dk
I am not trying to be pedantic here (is that even the right word) but about 10 words after saying there is no "might" about it, you say changes "may" be coming. When these things happen, and they are actually bad, I will be right next to you wiht pitchfork and whiskey in hand to step on ol wormbrain's nuts. But until then, its an awful lot reaction with no action to speak of.
This Alan guy seems the farthest from “frothy” I can imagine
Like I said, I just had enough on the topic. I won't deny your reporting, I am sure he is a swell guy, as is Moyn obviously.
Great outro music today ❤️I love Andy's statement that shared belief & shared world view are not the same (huge) and I also agree with the assertion that lifestyle & affluence play gigantic roles in weight & health matters. I wish the Covid part of conversation would've included an acknowledgment that reliable scientific data was available early on and suppressed (like Bhattacharya study proving that Covid appeared to have already been a great deal more prevalent/present than assumed). The fact that disagreement & discussion were not only not permitted but were punished should always be an important part of a Covid mea culpa imho
Alan not Andy doi!!
Great interview and great guest. I live in a geographic divide, straddled between immigrant ag workers whose children I work with every day, and extreme wealth (Ojai, Montecito, Malibu). We talk in class about who "gets" to shop at the "good stores" for food. It nearly always comes back to kind of what Alan said: you can find great food even at the Dollar Store. It's not about where you're getting it, it's about what you're buying and paying attention.
Wish he would've gotten into the meat and dairy ag world, but that's a dedicated discussion. Anyway, excellent talk and thanks for the timely release.
Incredible to hear Alan articulate the exact same warning about arguing with conspiracy theorists that Moynihan has mentioned so many times before. Truly, kindred spirits.
I love conspiracy theories because they are fun, not because they are correct!
Great episode- especially liked the point about how changes show science actually working. That is almost completely unappreciated by people…
Alan is really straw manning here—yes, RFKJ talks about dyes and chemical additives, but this isn’t by any means exhaustive of what Alan refers to as the “naturalistic fallacy.” RFKJ also talks about the importance of exercise, eating whole foods, avoid highly addictive, nutrient-deficient, ultra-processed foods, and a host of other environmental and behavioral issues that Alan himself endorses.
Defaulting to the “most natural” available option in any scenario is a heuristic some of us prefer to use in life. That doesn’t mean we can never take pharmaceuticals. Trusting and deferring to technological innovation and institutional authority by default is simply another heuristic. That doesn’t mean you never use functional herbs (coffee, tea, etc.). Both are shortcuts, and most people operate using one or the other when making simple decisions. Why the hysterics about people who use a different heuristic from your own when both allow for exceptions and each has it’s own costs and benefits?
What hysterics?
That’s a fair point—“hysterics” is relevant to the broader media landscape, not to Moynihan and Alan in particular. Although describing RFKJ as “incredibly dangerous” is still pretty overblown, imo. It’s more of a knee-jerk, visceral aversion to RFKJ in the case of Michael and Alan.
I dunno, if I met a guy who wanted to throw people in jail for having the incorrect opinion on climate change…I might think handing him any kind of power is a little dangerous. And I wouldn’t think I’m hysterical for feeling that way…
Put another way, I think there’s room for being critical without it being a symptom of some larger “RFK Derangement Syndrome”
Yes, I would agree with this point wholeheartedly. We do need to maintain a critical eye when evaluating anyone who sets the agenda and policies. I guess my main intention is to draw more attention to the fact that, as Alan himself suggests—though he only made this point when discussing RFKJ’s worldview—we are all running on heuristics and default assumptions about the world. I would, at bottom, appreciate if this was acknowledged across the board. “I trust scientific consensus by default because the benefits of unrestrained innovation outweigh the harms” is as heuristic, as is “I distrust individuals with a conspiratorial frame of mind because they’re prone to amplify false positives in their search for corruption.” We didn’t vote to sign off on the most naively idealistic and sometimes absurd comments RFKJ made over the last 10 years, we voted on the belief that a heuristic which will inevitably lead to false positives will ultimately serve us better at this moment in time than the one that has produced so many false negatives in recent years.
Highly addictive nutrient deficient ultra processed foods is, itself a strawman. Ultra processed has no meaning and is dumb. Nutrient deficient means what, exactly? Cheerios vs Special K vs Total? Highly addictive is code for “tastes really good.”
Not at all. “Ultra-processed” is shorthand for foods designed by scientists, produced in a factory setting, and consisting primarily of ingredients that are unrecognizable in the context of most culinary traditions. From an evolutionary standpoint, we have no history consuming large amounts of refined sugars, rancid fats, chemical preservatives, and ingredients processed to such an extent that they bear scant resemblance to the actual plants and animals from which they are derived. Many such ingredients have been shown to increase metabolic dysfunction, slow the release of appetite-regulating hormones, and damage the microbiome, to name just a few unforeseen consequences that have direct bearing on poor nutrient absorption and subsequent overconsumption. Fixating on single ingredients, artificial dyes, for example, and not recognizing the causal role ultra-processed foods play in promoting overeating, obesity, and negative overall health is to miss the forest for the trees.
This is scientifically illiterate.
I totally agree with your analysis. Actually, this interview annoyed me a lot, and probably for pretty special personal reasons, but it seems like i'm in the minority.
Levinovitz said the exact same things about food/diets/additives/weird worldviews that my sis in law says, and she is a registered dietician. (She had a client in KY who had never eaten a piece of fruit!)
One challenge to what he said: There was a time when low income people grew some veggies to supplement their diets. This practice could be revitalized - it's not hard and seeds are cheap. I learned how to grow stuff from my mom when she was divorced and very broke.
Seeds are cheap, but other inputs are not. And without a fancy indoor grow setup, one needs access to private outdoor space.
It's true that urban dwellers will struggle, but that's only 1/3 of the poor. Drive through the poorest parts of NC/SC/GA/KY/TN and they have yards. Planting in the ground is a $25 shovel, elbow grease and a hose. (I have never once used fertilizer) Perhaps it doesn't cross people's minds that they could grow food themselves - and that is the lost art.`
Something like >40% of all vegetables came from victory gardens during WWII. It can definitely be done
I loved this interview. I came to heterodoxy (I know, I know, I’m rolling my eyes too) by way of skepticism and the things this conversation canvassed were once the life’s blood of skepticism. The big S Skeptics left me behind, as they got more woke and less skeptical, but I’m always happy to see small s skeptics still doing the work. I’m off to Amazon to buy that guy’s book!
Yeah, they’re the big ones I meant. I was dismayed by Elevatorgate; pissed off about Harriet Hall and consider them distinctly unskeptical about youth transition…
I admit to being a bit tender about Hall. As a veteran, she was a hero to me because of her military career. And I originally came to skepticism through my experiences raising a disabled child. My daughter has cerebral palsy, and you wouldn’t believe the snake oil salesmen who come calling when you have a kid in a wheelchair. So, Hall’s work against alt med resonated with me so much. I raised my kids to be critical thinkers. My daughter is now 37 and has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology.
that was my path as well. the sgu was the first podcast i regularly listened to, & i stuck with them for almost a decade, i think. but at some point i realized they were annoying me as much as enriching me.
i think the tipping point was when i heard a host use 'latinx' unironically. they also had some commentary around the floyd riots that made me realize these were not my kinds of people.
Same, although I tapped out a little earlier. I was baffled by the Elevatorgate thing, but what really got me was when Rebecca Watson’s crew of “Skepchicks” rounded on Harriet Hall who was exponentially more accomplished than any of them. She was a physician who had done actual research-based skepticism for years. But Watson et al deemed her insufficiently ‘feminist’ (despite the fact that, as the Air Force’s first female Flight Doctor she was an actual real-life feminist icon), and inadequately up to date on all the LGBT terminology that the Stepchicks felt necessary. That was the end for me. Even after Watson left to focus more on her activist ‘work,’ I had such a bad taste in my mouth I never went back. Later, Steven Novella (who worked with Hall at Science-Based Medicine) retracted her modestly favorable review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage. Jesse Singal reported on this and it reinforced my feeling that the SGU had left me behind.
elevatorgate was definitely a warning flare. i followed that harriet hall business via twitter, and that was definitely another really dispiriting tipping point. david gorski in particular has shown himself to be an absolutely dink in the aftermath of all that as well. he probably always was, i suppose, but it was easy to handwave away or even support his jerkiness when i thought he was on the side of angels.
I'm out of the Skeptical loop myself. What big S skeptics are you referring to? Like SGU?
There's a fallacious mode of argument where people, for whatever reason, refuse direct engagement with a particular idea and instead take a step back and hand-waive at a more general, less defined idea that they claim trumps the need to address the original idea.
Moynihan does a good job addressing this early on in this episode, using the example of one person shoving an old lady into traffic and another shoving an old lady out of traffic—saying that you can't step back and hand-waive them both together into "people shoving old ladies around," which was correct.
However minutes later, Levinovitz touted his penchant for engaging in this exact mode of argument, calling it "arguing the shape of people's beliefs" rather than their actual beliefs. He gave the example of someone claiming the Keto diet cured their diabetes, and said his favorite response to this is, "Every other diet dating back to Taoist monks claims to cure people too. What about those?"
Well, exactly /who/ is claiming that /which/ diets cured /what/ diseases? Are you saying Taoist monks knew about diabetes? What are you getting at?
The problem here is he started with a specific example (Keto vs Diabetes), and instead of addressing the specific claim, took a step back and hand-waived that all "diets" claim to "cure" people (not of any specific disease, but just "cure" in general), and his big gotcha was "So what about all the other diets that claim to cure people?"
Well, much of diabetes management is all about managing blood sugar spikes, which as I think every doctor that treats it would agree, can be managed by limited carbohydrate diets—so it makes sense that a diabetic on Keto would see a huge benefit. But I guess that doesn't matter, because "all diets" claim to "cure people," so checkmate?
I would argue that the entire mode of argument is bad, and that if you're not prepared to get into the weeds and be specific, then maybe you shouldn't be trying to argue against it at all.
I know that makes it hard to debate with people like RFK Jr, but the world doesn't owe us easy arguments. Welcome to Earth.
Why don’t you just interview RFK?
I'd listen to that only if Michael does his RFK voice the entire time.
Everyone wants the magic beans; no one wants to eat their vegetables.
Everyone wants their cake, and to eat it too!
There’s an awful lot of “cope” in the relatively few comments here.