I feel the same way you do about dietary news and psychological health, but I think what we're victims of in both cases is people wanting to run to extremes with small bits of new knowledge. Often the science itself isn't making huge claims, but the popular press wants to.
But apart from that, scientists have a really bad habit of being unable to see how their own biases affect their results--this is really clear in social sciences, but it's true in other areas too. This isn't to say that we can't trust science but only to say that we have every right to be skeptical about things that provoke that response. Which sounds like a circular sentence, but my point is, there's nothing magical about science that means we have to dismiss our skepticism.
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Date: 2017-02-11 02:30 pm (UTC)But apart from that, scientists have a really bad habit of being unable to see how their own biases affect their results--this is really clear in social sciences, but it's true in other areas too. This isn't to say that we can't trust science but only to say that we have every right to be skeptical about things that provoke that response. Which sounds like a circular sentence, but my point is, there's nothing magical about science that means we have to dismiss our skepticism.