Many scientists dont want to hunt for black swans, however, because they dont want to blow up their hypotheses. Diligently searching for black swans is a much more valid scientific endeavor than simply looking for more white swans. The more effort scientists expend to find a black swan without finding one, the more their hypothesis is strengthened. Popper argued that scientists should be working to find black swans instead of simply adding more and more white swan sightings to their data. It can, however, be disproved by the discovery of even a single black swan. The hypothesis can be strengthened by doing so, but it cant be proven. He made the case that this hypothesis cannot be confirmed by simply pointing out more and more white swans. He used the following as an example of a good hypothesis: All swans are white. One of the examples Popper used in explaining how a hypothesis should be established involved swans – white and black. And real scientists – of which, sadly, there are all too few in the field of nutrition – dont try to confirm their hypotheses: they try to refute them. That doesn’t mean it will be falsified, but it should be structured in a way that it can be. A well-stated hypothesis should be able to be falsified. Popper set the standards by which hypotheses should be structured. I wrote a long post a couple of years ago on Sir Karl Popper and the metabolic advantage. Instead of undertaking a serious scientific inquiry, he is looking for more white swans. His response–as I figured it would be–is merely a listing of even more papers he believes substantiate his claims. Since I posted the first part of my critique, AC has responded using his customary restraint and understated gentility designed to appeal to his sort of reader. If anything, AC’s own evidence argues for the existence of a metabolic advantage, and, at worst, certainly doesn’t prove that one doesn’t exist. After going back and rereading the post, I still feel that if this evidence were presented to a jury, the verdict would come back in favor of my arguments. I stuck with the papers AC used and presented my arguments as to why I didn’t think his papers proved his case.
I didn’t want to go out myself and gather a bunch of papers that confirmed my viewpoint, because then we would have had nothing but a bunch of dueling Ph.Ds, a bunch of he saids, she saids, that wouldn’t prove anything. I intended to make the critique much like a court case in which one side presents the information and the other attempts to counter it.
I decided to base this critique not on the scientific literature at large, but instead on only the papers that AC mustered for his argument. Gary thought the data presented in all the studies in AC’s chart was ambiguous and that I was going out on a limb a little in making the statement that I thought, if anything, that the papers argued for a metabolic advantage. He emailed me saying he had read the post and thought it was great up to the point right at the end where I wrote that the data on the whole showed that, if anything, there was a metabolic advantage. Gary Taubes thinks I may even have succumbed a little in the earlier post on AC and the metabolic advantage. We all fall victim to the confirmation bias and have to fight it constantly. And this same bias prevents him from even taking a scientific approach to the problem. His bias has hypnotized him to the point that he cant see anything that doesnt confirm his what he already believes. As discussed in the previous post, our friend, like the kid to the left, is focused so intently on his refusal to believe in even the possibility of the existence of a metabolic advantage that he cant read the literature correctly – not even the very literature he uses to try to prove his own position. On to the second and, mercifully, final part of the critical review of the metabolic advantage as presented by A Colpo in his book The Fat-Loss Bible.
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