The immediately available example supporting your article for me is the relationship between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. There’s high general confusion around this health claim.
What no doubt compounds the confusion on the issue is that intuitively you might infer that eating zero cholesterol should lower blood cholesterol, or that eating high cholesterol should raise blood cholesterol. Evidence shows this often happens, but not always. There are enough notable outliers that the claim has been defeated in the general mind because it doesn’t support the intuitive story.
That is, vegans who eat almost no cholesterol containing foods, can have high blood cholesterol. On the flip side, surely everyone has heard of that friend of a friend who eats inf eggs a day and has low blood cholesterol.
There’s a reasonably interesting story that fits the evidence for the claim that if dietary cholesterol then blood cholesterol, but the nonlinearity of the relationship and also the incidence of intuition defeating cases cloud the issue.
I discovered lesswrong.com because someone left a printout of an article on the elliptical machine in my gym. I started reading it and have become hooked.
I’m a formally uneducated computer expert. The lack of formal education makes me a bit insecure, so I obsess over improving my thinking through literature on cognitive dissonance and biases, such as books from the library and also sites like this.
Nowadays I get paid to be a middle-manager at technology companies. Most of my career has been in Linux system administration as well as functional programming.
I’m a bit of a health nut. I adopted a whole-food plant-based diet (the “China Study” diet) because it seems most well supported in the literature, although a broad consensus on the topic has not emerged. I base this decision in part on my trust of experts with titles after their names, since I’m too out of my element to read and interpret most of the literature on my own. At the same time I have a personal anecdote that this works well, so those two are enough to convince me for now.
There are times when I find reading about rational thinking rather sobering. It’s clear that we were born with an irrational, “defective”, brain and that we would be so lucky if we could even make a small dent in improving our decision making. Improvements seem very hard to come by, I worry that all I’m really doing is learning to distrust my beliefs.
So that’s a nutshell full. How’s everyone else? :)